Circuit Riders, Midnight Appointments, and Packed Benches: A History of the Supreme Court

One ruler by which to measure the success of a given presidency is by its appointment of judges, as these appointments remain long after a president leaves office, allowing a lasting influence on law and public policy. In fact, according to Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice, court appointments are “the lasting legacy of the President, for every conceivable issue.” By this benchmark, if you’ll excuse a pun, and perhaps by no others, Trump’s presidency can be considered a success by his party. For reference, over 4 years, he managed to nominate almost 300 federal judges, and got more than 240 confirmed, including three Supreme Court Justices. By comparison, over 8 years, Obama only got about 350 confirmed, including 2 Supreme Court seats. This means Trump was on track to appoint nearly double the number of judges as Obama had. Now, Trump claimed in his recent “debate” with Biden that this is because Obama negligently left him seats to fill. In point of fact, Obama had been obstructed throughout his presidency by Senate Republicans, even when they did not have control of the Senate. You see, there was a longstanding practice of senatorial courtesy that said a federal court nominee for any given state must get approval from both its Senators, which Republicans consistently refused to give. In 2013, Majority Leader Harry Reid exercised a “nuclear option” to circumvent their obstruction, limiting confirmation debate and requiring only a simple majority to confirm, which resulted in Obama’s judge confirmation rate soaring to 90%. However, Republicans took the Senate in 2014, and new Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took their obstruction to unheard of levels, reducing Obama’s confirmation rate to a dismal 28% over the next two years. This was why so many seats remained to be filled when Trump took office, and McConnell, already leveraging the Democrats’ own nuclear option against them, introduced a few tricks of his own: he extended the practice of requiring only a simple majority even to Supreme Court nominations, which Reid had excluded, AND he declared that they would not observe Senatorial courtesy, meaning essentially they would ignore a blue slip from a Senator objecting to a nominee in his or her state, a completely hypocritical flip flop from when he insisted that Republicans could use blue slips to veto any nominees. This paved the way for Trump to get judges confirmed far more easily than his Democratic predecessor. But I suppose, if we’re looking for who to credit or blame for the Trump administration’s appointment of a quarter of all active federal judges within 4 years, it seems more like McConnell’s legacy than Trump’s.

But here’s the thing. Judges are meant to be non-partisan. Of course, all people have political leanings, but judges are expected not to let their partisanship influence their interpretation of law. Therefore, clearly ideological nominees have always been controversial and even damaging to a President, especially when they are nominations to the Supreme Court of the United States. In 2009, when Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor, Republicans objected that she was a liberal judicial activist, and 31 of them voted nay on her confirmation, but Dems still managed to get her confirmed with a supermajority of 67 votes, surpassing even the 60 votes needed. Then, in 2010, conscious of the Senate fight that might result from a controversial nominee, Obama nominated the moderate Elena Kagan and was criticized by his own party for it, since she would be replacing John Paul Stevens, who was considered by many the most liberal leaning justice on the bench. But despite this concession of nominating a moderate even while his party held the majority and he could have gotten a liberal-leaning justice confirmed, he faced an uphill battle with Senate Republicans, who seemed determined to object to any nominee, resulting in an even more hard-won confirmation with only 63 yea votes for Kagan. Come March 2016, a full 8 months before the election of a new president and ten months before the end of Obama’s final term, sitting conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia passed away unexpectedly of natural causes in his sleep. Trying to avoid another controversy, Obama nominated another moderate, Merrick Garland. This time, McConnell had a firm stranglehold on the Senate, and he made the scandalous decision to simply ignore the nomination and not convene a confirmation hearing at all. He cited history to defend his decision, claiming that no Senate has confirmed a nominee from a President of an opposing party during the last year of their presidency since the 1880s. It’s unclear what example of such a confirmation he’s referring to in the 1880s, but it is clear that he was not telling the truth. In 1988, during the last year of Reagan’s presidency, a Democrat-controlled Senate confirmed Anthony Kennedy 97 to 0. McConnell might object that Dems confirmed Kennedy because the moderate Kennedy was a concession, but so was the moderate Merrick Garland. And here’s the thing, if we want to find an actual historical precedent for the obstruction of McConnell and his Republican Senate, we have to look much further back than the 1880s. You see, no Senate has simply refused to hold a confirmation hearing for this reason since 1853! Back then, when political parties held no resemblance to our party system today, Whig president Millard Fillmore nominated Edward Bradford in August of 1852, an election year, and the Senate, controlled by the opposing party, did nothing. Then, as a lame duck, Fillmore made two more nominations, George Badger and William Micou, and the Senate majority continued to do nothing, waiting it out until the inauguration of the new president, one of their own, so that they could give him the seat to fill. And if one is not troubled by the hypocrisy of McConnell’s justification for his inaction—claiming falsely that such a thing hadn’t been done since the 1880s when in fact what HE was doing hadn’t been done since the 1850s—then certainly one should be appalled at his subsequent flip-flop in 2020, when just days before an election his party’s president was polling to lose—and of course did, unequivocally, lose—he rammed through a conservative nominee to the Supreme Court to fill the seat of the recently passed liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, against her dying wishes, just a week before election day. Since these events, there has been much talk among progressives of a need to expand the Supreme Court, which liberals may characterize as a balancing of the bench, and conservatives denounce as packing the bench. So it’s time to look to the history of the Supreme Court and its structure to determine what precedent there may be for its expansion and to evaluate what the case may be for doing it beyond partisan one-upsmanship.

George Badger, a Supreme Court nominee denied a confirmation hearing like Merrick Garland way back in 1853. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In discussing the controversy over McConnell’s underhanded tactics to take a conservative majority of Supreme Court seats and the controversy over the prospect of a Democratic Congress expanding the court, we must first establish a baseline understanding of the formation of the Supreme Court, how its structure has changed throughout American history and why, as well as how those changes were effected. Recently, with some Democrats discussing their openness to judicial reforms like expanding the Supreme Court bench or establishing term limits for its justices, Marco Rubio, a Republican Senator from Florida, has proposed a Constitutional amendment to prevent more than nine seats from being added to the Supreme Court bench, which Rubio says would be “delegitimizing" and suggests would represent a “further destabilization of essential institutions,” though of course he doesn’t indicate how this would delegitimate or destabilize the highest court in the land. In fact, he himself admits that “[t]here is nothing magical about the number nine. It is not inherently right just because the number of seats on the Supreme Court remains unchanged since 1869.” So it seems apparent that by delegitimize and destabilize he only means that he wants to prevent the opposing party from offsetting of the ill-gotten majority that conservatives have seized… so really he wants to prevent it from being stabilized. But regardless, getting an amendment passed is unlikely, since it would require a supermajority vote in both houses OR two-thirds of states legislatures to approve—I think I said it requires both in my last post, but it’s either/or, and regardless, it’s unlikely to happen. But this just highlights the fact that the number of seats on the Supreme Court is not written into our Constitution. In fact, the Framers of the Constitution had little to say about the structure of the Supreme Court, preferring to leave that to the first Congress, who in the Judiciary Act of 1789 established three circuits and a Supreme Court of six justices who would preside over the circuits. Even then, though, Senators argued for more than six justices, suggesting that a deeper bench of justices would lend the court dignity, like England’s Exchequer chamber, and that having more critical minds at work would make for better considered verdicts. In the end, though, they settled on the six, reasoning that, as the country’s population grew, they could always add more. Since then, seven more times, by the passage or repeal of Judiciary Acts, it has fluctuated between 5 and 10 seats. So all it takes, all it has ever taken, is an act of Congress to add seats to the Supreme Court. What Rubio wants to do with an amendment is take away the ability of Congress to pass Judiciary Acts to alter the structure of the Supreme Court, which itself would be a “further destabilization of essential institutions.” But the question to be considered now is, what was the reasoning, historically, behind changes to the structure of the Supreme Court, and how does it reflect on the case for expanding the Supreme Court today?

The first of these changes to the structure of the Supreme Court came just after the contentious election of 1800, about which I spoke so much in my episode on Illuminati conspiracy theories in America, and the Judiciary Act of 1801 was extremely controversial then and even today. The act, passed by lame duck Federalists after their party’s power had essentially been obliterated with John Adams’s defeat in the recent election, was portrayed by Thomas Jefferson as a last ditch effort by Federalists to entrench their power institutionally in the judicial branch of government. It looked suspicious that it had been passed with such haste less than a month before Jefferson’s inauguration, creating with the stroke of a pen several new circuit courts and with them, more than 20 new judge seats, 18 of which Adams managed to fill with so-called “midnight appointments” made between February 20th and March 4th, literally the day before Jefferson took office. And not only did this act dramatically expand the federal court system and pack it with Federalists, it also made it more difficult for Jefferson to put any man of his own on the Supreme Court by establishing that, at the time of the next vacancy, the court would simply be reduced by one seat, bringing it from six to five justices. Adams refused to attend Jefferson’s inauguration, where Jefferson actually made a conciliatory plea to his opponents for national unity. Upon taking office, he found some of these midnight commissions signed and undelivered, and he refused to deliver them, instead appointing men of his own to some of these judgeships. Not only that, he immediately set about working with his party to repeal the Judiciary Act of 1801, which he succeeded in doing, reversing the expansion of the federal circuit courts and restoring the size of the Supreme Court. A few years later, when Federalist Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase publicly expressed his dissatisfaction with the act’s repeal, Jefferson called his remarks “seditious” and encouraged the House of Representatives to impeach him, which they did. This was the first and only time a sitting Supreme Court Justice was impeached.

Tiebout, Cornelius, Engraver, and Rembrandt Peale. Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States. [Philada. Philadelphia: Published by A. Day, No. 38 Chesnut Street, Philada., ?] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/96522974/>.

For about a century, historians gobbled up Jefferson’s version of the Midnight Judges Act, vilifying Adams for abusing his power to embed Federalism in the courts, but in the 20th century, this view of the act has been questioned. In point of fact, the act had been written before the Federalists lost their power in the election, and all of its provisions were enacted to address the real concerns of Supreme Court Justices. The way the court system had been established in 1789, the Supreme Court was the highest appellate court, but some of its justices were also required to sit as trial judges in the circuit courts. This meant that justices had to “ride the circuit,” or travel sometimes great distances in inclement weather in order to judge cases in the various circuit courts, and it also meant that, when some of the same cases they had presided over on the circuit were appealed, they were appealing to the same judge who had already decided the case. While it was believed that Supreme Court Justices would become better judges by being out there, sitting in courtrooms all across the country, justices complained that the burden of constant travel prevented them from cultivating their knowledge of the law through study—basically time they spent on the road, they said, would be better spent in a library—and the fact that the process frequently resulted in them reviewing their own decisions shows it was poorly thought out. In practice, circuit courts often could not even be convened because the Supreme Court Justice who was supposed to preside did not show up. So, although the making of midnight appointments placing mostly his own loyal Federalists into judgeships remains questionable, the Judiciary Act of 1801 can be seen as a clear attempt to address these problems by creating the office of the circuit court judge, and since Supreme Court Justices would no longer need to ride the circuit, it stood to reason they also would not need so many justices. Thus the reduction in seats. Perhaps the most important lesson to take from this episode, however, can be found in a petition to Congress by the Supreme Court in 1792, asking for Congress to fix the court. In their appeal, they referred to the “general and well-founded opinion” that the Judiciary Act of 1789 that had created the court “was to be considered as introducing a temporary expedient rather than a permanent system and that it would be revised….” Here the first Supreme Court Justices themselves indicate that the structure of the Supreme Court was not set in stone at its creation. Rather, it was meant to be an evolving institution, changing with the needs of the country.

At first, the court expanded specifically because of the growth of the country. After the repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801, justices were once again required to ride the circuit, but as new circuit courts were added, so also were new Supreme Court Justices to ease the burden. With the Seventh Circuit Act of 1807, another circuit was added and thus another Supreme Court justice. Then during Andrew Jackson’s administration, the Eighth and Ninth Circuits Act of 1837 added a couple more, bringing the number of justices to nine. If we had continued to keep the number of seats on the bench proportional to the number of regional circuits, then we would have 12 or 13 justices now, but this did not remain the basis for the Supreme Court’s structure. A 10th Circuit and thus a 10th justice were added briefly during the Civil War, but in 1866, the Judicial Circuits Act reduced the number of circuits to nine and the number of Supreme Court seats to seven. This act was really a redistricting effort to minimize the influence of Southern slaveholding states, which because of the way circuits had been drawn had previously dominated the Supreme Court. Finally, in 1869, another Judiciary Act set the number of justices at nine and once more created circuit court judges who would sit with district court judges to hear appeals, thus greatly reducing the burden placed on Supreme Court justices of having to ride the circuit. One would think that, after this, all was well. Thus divorced from the circuit courts, nine justices should have been plenty to hear whatever higher appeal cases arose, especially since only 6 of those justices were needed to form a quorum, the minimum number assembled to be considered valid. But the country was growing still, and so was the court’s workload. By the late 19th century, with around 600 new cases being filed a year, they were running a backlog of nearly 2 thousand cases! Once again, the Court appealed to Congress, and many believed then that the Supreme Court should be expanded to eleven or even eighteen justices in order to handle their case load. One Senator Manning even proposed that it be expanded to 21 justices composed of three panels of seven justices each! In the end, though, instead of expanding the bench, Congress chose to reduce the case load first, in the Judiciary Act of 1891, by creating a court of appeals for every circuit, and then, in 1916, by giving the Supreme Court the right to decline to review cases. So rather than increase the ability of the highest court to take on more cases, they enabled it to simply refuse to consider cases. So the Supreme Court went from hearing arguments on nearly 100% of the cases brought before it to considering only around 1% of petitions.

FDR delivering a “fireside chat.” Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Then came the Great Depression and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation, intended to aid in the country’s recovery. FDR could not contain his disappointment and reproval when the Supreme Court handed down a series of decisions in 1935 and ’36 that vitiated some key centerpieces of the New Deal, such as the Railroad Retirement Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act, and a minimum wage law for women and children. In one of his signature Fireside Chats in March of 1937, he characterized the court as working at counter purposes with the rest of the government. To FDR, the refusal of older justices to retire was something that had not been foreseen by those who had crafted the structure of the court, allowing a bench dominated by individuals who were out of touch with the current needs of the country and the political will of the people. He proposed the automatic addition of a younger justice whenever a sitting justice reached 70 and refused to retire. This proposal was dubbed “court packing,” a term you may have heard recently with the resurgent talk of expanding the bench. If such a policy were enacted through legislation today, it would automatically result in the addition of three new justices, one each for Stephen Breyer, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, all of whom are 70 or older. The total number of justices would rise to 12 until some older justices retired. And if Sonia Sotomayor and John Roberts, both of whom are nearing seventy, didn’t retire in a few years, that number could climb higher. But no Democrats have specifically proposed FDR’s plan. Nevertheless, opponents of expanding the court still summon memories of this controversial proposal by calling any judicial reform “court packing.”

As a bit of an aside, I recently received a critical email from a listener suggesting that I have a case of historical blindness because in my last episode I referred to the current Supreme Court as “packed” and “conservative-packed,” after asserting that Trump had packed it with conservative justices. He, like some in that media, would accuse me of purposely misusing the term, and of projection, since in his view, I am saying conservatives are guilty of packing the court, when liberals are the one advocating “court packing” in the 1930’s sense of the term. First, I’ll say that I would never claim to be immune from historical blindness. I have many times during the course of making this podcast exploded myths that I myself have previously held as true or even mentioned on the show! Case in point: the midwife-witch and folk healer-as-witch myths that I believe I ignorantly spread before discovering they were dubious this October. However, in this case, I don’t believe that the word “packing” is or even historically was used only to refer to Supreme Court expansion. Who can forget the ribald jokes about “Bush packing” when George W. Bush was being accused of packing the courts. Indeed, if you look to the useful Google NGram tool, it’s rather easy to see how early the term was being used. While the specific phrase “court packing” does indeed first peak in the literature of 1937, the phrases “packed bench” and “packed court” (the latter of which was the term I used) were in fact far more commonly used in the 19th century. The terms “packed court” or “packed bench” were invariably used to refer to courts in which the judges were prejudiced, among whom a certain ideology dominated, coloring their decisions. An apt example of this usage can be found in the remarks of Ohio Representative Benjamin Wade regarding the Supreme Court decision on the Dred Scott case, when he called the justices “packed judges—for they were packed, and I have about as little respect for a packed court as I have for a packed jury.” To clarify, Wade was alleging a conflict of interest, a prejudice or bias, stating, “I believe, the majority who concurred in the opinion were all slaveholders, and, of course, if anybody was interested to give a favorable construction to the holders of that species of property, these men were interested in the question.” So, as it turns out, I would venture to assert that my usage of the term “packed court” as referring to a bench of justices dominated by ideologues was correct. Of course, that is a case that I’ll have to make, and I’ll attempt to do so, momentarily.

The Supreme Court bench that Benjamin Wade called “packed,” via supremecourthistory.org

FDR’s “court packing” proposal ended up fizzling out when the Supreme Court started reversing decisions and finding in favor of New Deal legislation. Some have portrayed this as the Supreme Court beating FDR at his own game, causing him to lose support for “court packing” because there was no longer a need for it. However, another view is that he put political pressure on the court and got what he wanted. A historical debate has since raged over whether or not the justices of the Supreme Court at the time were actually swayed by FDR’s pressure or whether they would have ended up coming to their favorable decisions regardless. This debate, between “externalists” arguing that external pressure made the difference, and “internalists” who assert that the justices did not allow themselves to be influenced by partisan politics, really gets at the heart of the debate surrounding both the Supreme Court’s partisanship and its role among the tripartite branches of government. One common view is that regardless of the personal views of the justices, the Supreme Court is inevitably a majoritarian force, if not bowing to the will of the party in power then at least leaning in the direction the wind seems to blow, which is sometimes in the direction of cross-partisan coalitions. The idea here is that the court must play politics to a certain degree and cannot make decisions that are unpopular with the majority or they may be viewed as illegitimate and risk congressional intervention. This view works well with the externalist idea that FDR made them reverse their decisions by appealing to the people and painting them as obstructive to the national recovery. Then there is the view that the Supreme Court justices truly are uninfluenced by politics, a perspective that somehow raises them up as superior to most people in their ability to disregard such matters, a view encouraged by the “internalist” interpretation of this so-called Constitutional Revolution of 1937. But then there is the view that the Supreme Court is a counter-majoritarian force, in that, through its power of judicial review, it can strike down legislation passed by the representatives elected by the people, and thus acts as a check on not just other branches of government but on the will of the majority. Although historians of the court consider this latter view of its role something of a myth, Roosevelt certainly seems to have held it, at least until the court turned his way. But what about today? Can this Supreme Court be considered a “packed court” dominated by partisan activists poised to act counter to the will of the people?

If we are looking for proof of a concerted effort to pack the bench of the Supreme Court and federal courts generally with justices who will take a conservative view in all their decisions, we need look no further than the Federalist Society. You may have heard of this organization before, but now, after my discussion of Adams’s midnight appointments, you know that their name could easily be interpreted as a reference to the original court-packers, the Federalists. Starting out during the Reagan Era as a group of conservative and libertarian law students mentored by Antonin Scalia, they bemoaned the atmosphere of liberal academia and advocated for a more originalist view of the Constitution. Since then, the organization has grown by leaps and bounds, mainly due to a vast influx of funding from donors with deep pockets, so that now it boasts several tens of thousands of members, law professors, politicians, pundits, and judges. In fact, many in the field see the Federalist Society as their best shot at securing a judgeship, because the organization has established itself as the go-to for any Republican President, providing a short-list of candidates who conform ideologically with their conservative principles. So you have lawyers and judges toeing this ideological line, kowtowing to the Federalist Society and their rubric in order to secure a better chance of advancement. At this point, the majority of the Supreme Court bench attained their lifetime appointments by meeting this de facto conservative requirement of membership in the Federalist Society: Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and now Amy Coney Barrett, who seems to have been groomed by the society to take her seat on this packed bench. An enlightened centrist might argue that both sides are guilty of such judge grooming, but in fact, the frequently cited liberal counterpart to the Federalist Society, the American Constitution Society, was only formed in 2001 when the growing influence of the Federalist Society became clear after the Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the presidency. The ACS, however, is still in its infancy, without the deep funding and membership that the Federalist Society enjoys.

Now, it may be hard to imagine anyone these days being wide- and dewy-eyed enough to argue that the Supreme Court really is the non-partisan institution that idealists would like it to be. But the mere fact that the Supreme Court bench is and always has been a partisan battleground doesn’t mean that taking back a majority for the other side is enough of a justification for expanding the court. In fact, such an argument should rightly be viewed as squalid and distasteful. Actually, I don’t shrink from suggesting that the ruthless tactics employed by conservatives like Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society to take their majority might call for equally obdurate countermeasures, and that “balancing” the court would not be an unfair characterization of such measures. However, there is a far more virtuous case to be made for the expansion of the Supreme Court. Beyond a possibly pressing need to thwart a counter-majoritarian power grab, there is the fact, as made evident throughout this history of the Supreme Court, that having a deeper bench would allow the highest appeals court in the country to take on far more cases than it currently deigns to hear. More decisions would result in more consistency and clarity in American jurisprudence. More cases means more chances for judicial review and interpretation, which makes the Supreme Court a far more effective check on the executive and legislative branches of government as well. And more justices, able to rotate and interchange in differently structured quorums, would vastly reduce the influence of swing votes. Right now, just as swing states decide presidential elections, swing justices decide most important interpretations of the Constitution. Reducing the disproportionate power of the swing justice will then in turn reduce partisan activism on the court, or at least it will diminish the perception of its politicization. And that is just what the U.S. needs right now, to turn down the country’s partisanship generally. This might be a hot button partisan issue, but it represents a path to a little less division.

Further Reading

Bomboy, Scott. “Packing the Supreme Court Explained.” Constitution Daily, 20 March 2019, constitutioncenter.org/blog/packing-the-supreme-court-explained.

Bridge, Dave. “The Supreme Court, Factions, and the Counter-Majoritarian Difficulty.” Polity, vol. 47, no. 4, 2015, pp. 420–460. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24540303.

Carney, Jordain. “Rubio to introduce legislation to keep Supreme Court at 9 seats.” The Hill, Capitol Hill Publishing, 20 March 2019, thehill.com/homenews/senate/434888-rubio-to-introduce-legislation-to-keep-supreme-court-at-nine-seats.

Carpenter, William S. “Repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801.” The American Political Science Review, vol. 9, no. 3, 1915, pp. 519–528. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1946064.

Farrand, Max. “The Judiciary Act of 1801.” The American Historical Review, vol. 5, no. 4, 1900, pp. 682–686. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1832774.

Gramlich, John. “How Trump compares with other recent presidents in appointing federal judges.” Pew Research Center, 15 July 2020, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/07/15/how-trump-compares-with-other-recent-presidents-in-appointing-federal-judges/.

Greenberg, Jon. “Fact-check: Why Barack Obama failed to fill over 100 judgeships.” Politifact, Poynter Institute, 2 Oct. 2020, www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/oct/02/donald-trump/fact-check-why-barack-obama-failed-fill-over-100-j/.

Kalman, Laura. “The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the New Deal.” The American Historical Review, vol. 110, no. 4, 2005, pp. 1052–1080. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.110.4.1052.

Kruse, Michael. “The Weekend at Yale That Changed American Politics.” Politico Magazine, Sep/Oct. 2018, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/08/27/federalist-society-yale-history-conservative-law-court-219608.

Madonna, Anthony J., et al. “Confirmation Wars, Legislative Time, and Collateral Damage: The Impact of Supreme Court Nominations on Presidential Success in the U.S. Senate.” Political Research Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 4, 2016, pp. 746–759. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44018054.

Mandery, Evan. “Why There’s No Liberal Federalist Society.” Politico Magazine, 23 Jan. 2019, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/23/why-theres-no-liberal-federalist-society-224033.

Matthews, Dylan. “The incredible influence of the Federalist Society, explained.” Vox, 3 June 2019, www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/3/18632438/federalist-society-leonard-leo-brett-kavanaugh.

Robinson, Nick. “Structure Matters: The Impact of Court Structure on the Indian and U.S. Supreme Courts.” The American Journal of Comparative Law, vol. 61, no. 1, 2013, pp. 173–208. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41721718.

Surrency, Erwin C. “The Judiciary Act of 1801.” The American Journal of Legal History, vol. 2, no. 1, 1958, pp. 53–65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/844302.

“What Is The Federalist Society And How Does It Affect Supreme Court Picks?” NPR, 28 June 2018, www.npr.org/2018/06/28/624416666/what-is-the-federalist-society-and-how-does-it-affect-supreme-court-picks

Williams, Joseph P. “McConnell to End Senate’s ‘Blue Slip’ Tradition.” U.S. News & World Report, 11 Oct. 2017, https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2017-10-11/mcconnell-to-end-senates-blue-slip-tradition.

The Smoke-Filled Room: Contested Elections in America

This was written before November 3rd, so if you’re wondering why I didn’t address some travesty or other, that is why. At the time of its posting, Joe Biden has been declared President Elect, but Trump continues refusing to concede, which unfortunately has ensured the continued relevance of this episode's subject matter.

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Prominent conspiracy theorist Donald Trump has long been casting doubt on the legitimacy of presidential election results. The most obvious early example of this was his claim, made very vocally in media appearances during Barack Obama’s 2011 reelection campaign, that Obama was not born in America, which if it were not completely false, would have made the 44th President illegitimate. Audio clips Then in 2015, when he was running for President, he made baseless claims about widespread voter fraud and election rigging and refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power. Audio clips Even after he won the office of President, he continued to claim that widespread voter fraud was the only explanation that he hadn’t won the popular vote, even going so far as to form a voter fraud commission to investigate. Audio clips Finding no evidence of widespread voter fraud, his commission was short-lived, and he quietly dissolved it without its having any effect on election law. Considering this background, it should have come as no surprise this year, during his reelection campaign, that he would again cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election before results were even determined. Audio clips Despite his claims, expert after expert have confirmed the security of mail-in ballots, which have long been used by absentee voters. But doubling down on his conspiracy theory, Trump went so far as to recommend that his base engage in voter fraud in order to counteract the voter fraud he suspected would be taking place. Audio clips And this wasn’t the only measure he took. It is one thing to expect election results not to be satisfactorily determined by the end of election day during a pandemic when many mail-in ballots have yet to be counted. It is quite another to hatch plans to contest the election results when polls are showing you trailing. Alarm bells rang earlier this summer when Trump appointees on the US Postal Service Board of Governors installed a new Postmaster General who began sweeping cost-cutting measures that some feared were designed to slow mail delivery ahead of the election, though it may be just as likely that these measures were an effort to make the USPS fail in order to justify its privatization, or that they were indeed earnest if misguided attempts to restore the agency’s solvency. Some of these may be conspiracy theories, and I recognize that, but Republicans certainly aren’t making it easy to disbelieve such claims. Here in California, the Republican Party got caught and admitted to placing more than 50 drop boxes om public that they had fraudulently labeled “official ballot drop off box[es].” Then there are the troubling inroads they’ve made with the Supreme Court, which Trump has had the opportunity to pack with conservative justices specifically sympathetic to his brand of authoritarian executive privilege because of the unfortunate recent deaths of sitting justices, and because of Republican obstruction during Obama’s final term and Senate hypocrisy in ramming through a nominee just days before the election. It is this conservative-packed Supreme Court bench that could be called upon to determine the outcome of a contested election, which seems more and more likely since all it would take would be for Trump’s sycophantic Attorney General to make some claims election fraud, and we have already seen that Bill Barr is willing to undertake whatever baseless investigation into political rivals that his boss requests. Already, without the benefit of having the latest Trump-nominated justice on the bench, this Supreme Court has decided that in Wisconsin, mail-in ballots that were postmarked by election day will not be valid if they are not received before the end of the day. In other words, voters who did everything they were supposed to do, and got their ballot in the mail in time, or even early, might have their ballots thrown out depending on the speed with which the postal service processes their ballot—a clear victory for Republicans, who have established themselves as the party of voter suppression. With the new justice Amy Coney Barrett on the bench, it would seem the circumstances favor Trump in the seemingly unavoidable event of a contested election. Indeed, by the time this episode releases, I anticipate that it will be well underway, unless one of the candidates wins by an inarguable landslide. It all seems rather chaotic and messy, not politics as usual… but is this really such an unusual scenario? What can American history tell us about how we deal with contested elections?

As I write this, less than a week remains until election day, but I do not anticipate that by election day we will know the results of this election. Indeed, I expect the results to take some time to calculate based on the delayed return of mail-in ballots, and then I assume we will see some kind of challenge to the results, whether that be from Trump claiming fraud or from Biden citing voter suppression. So by the time I publish this, the issue may still be foremost on American minds. Of course, I may be wrong, and there may be a landslide victory such as cannot be denied, such that contesting the results reported by any one state wouldn’t make a difference, but I doubt it because of how close elections have been in recent elections. In 2016, it was close enough that Trump won without earning the largest number of votes. And similarly, in 2000, George W. Bush also won the Electoral College vote but not the popular vote, and that election ended up being decided by the Supreme Court—not because Bush’s rival Al Gore had earned more votes, but because of voter irregularities in Florida that cast doubt on whether Bush should have taken its electoral votes. Who can forget the ceaseless jabbering of cable news talking heads about the Florida punched card ballots, which apparently presented a lot of clarity problems when their chads not completely punched, resulting in “fat chads” and “hanging chads” that weren’t properly counted by vote tabulating machines. While this ballot system was discontinued in the U.S., Trump’s recent grumblings about ballot security may portend another long battle looking endlessly at the ballots used certain states. Again, if I’m wrong, great! Even so, a close look at the history of our presidential election process seems warranted, and we must start with the Electoral College, which caused much upset and debate in the aforementioned elections of 2000 and 2016.

Punch card chads, photo by Marcin Wichary, licenced under Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0)

One delegate at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 described the issue of how to decide presidential elections and “the most difficult…on which we have had to decide.” The sovereignty and factionalism of separate states in the Union required an arcane and unique system. In seeking a historical precedent for the electoral college, one would have to look to the Holy Roman Empire, whose emperor was chosen prince-electors, or the Roman Catholic Church, whose Pope is selected by a College of Cardinals. This is especially ironic given the Founding Fathers’ feelings about royal governments and papistry. The idea, though, was to preserve the union by assuring small states that they too had a stake in the election of the chief executive. Thus, while electors, or representatives appointed to cast a vote for the president, were apportioned based on population, every state would receive at least two electors automatically. And in the event of no single candidate earning a majority of electoral votes, which the Framers expected would usually be the case, the contest would be decided by the House of Representatives, in which case each state would receive one vote only, completely equalizing populous and less populous states. And all states would enjoy the freedom to determine how they would select each of their districts’ electors, whether it be by popular vote or caucus. Almost immediately problems with the system arose, the first being that the number of electors apportioned to Southern states would be inflated by their slave population, who were not permitted to vote. Their notorious compromise to address this problem at the convention was that slaves would only count as three-fifths of a person with regard to not only number of electors apportioned but also House representation and taxation. The next complication was the emergence of partisan politics. By the original design, the runner-up would be installed as the vice-president, but in 1796 this resulted in an administration of bitter rivals, with John Adams as president and his opponent Thomas Jefferson as vice president. Imagine for a just moment if Hillary Clinton had been installed as Trump’s Vice President. Then in the election of 1800, during the Illuminati scare that I spoke so much about in a recent episode, the Democratic-Republicans nominated Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr as their choice for Vice President, but the two of them tied for electoral votes, which cast the contest into the House of Representatives to decide who would be President. Since electoral votes for not a particular office, Burr had as legitimate a claim to the presidency as Jefferson, despite being his party’s second choice. In fact, as every state had equal say in the House contingency, their Federalist rivals, bitter over their recent defeat, tried to vote Burr in to spite Jefferson, and it took more than thirty votes ending in an impasse with no clear majority until a single representative from Delaware final broke the deadlock and gave the majority to Jefferson. Thereafter, the Twelfth Amendment was ratified, requiring electors to cast different ballots for the offices of president and vice president.

This was by no means the end of the issues with the Electoral College system the Framers had settled on. As indicated, the Framers actually expected that presidential candidates would rarely earn a majority of electoral votes, which would mean that elections would typically be decided by the House contingency of one vote per state. It ended up being quite the reverse, though. The last time there was no electoral majority and the House contingency decided an election was in 1824, and it was far from a neat solution. The old political party system, of First Party System, had been in decline for a decade, with American politics now dominated by the party of Jefferson, the Democratic-Republicans, and in 1824, four candidates vied for the highest office all under this party’s banner: Henry Clay, William Crawford, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson. You may remember Donald Trump declaring early in his presidency that he believed himself to be very much like Andrew Jackson, an assertion that promptly drew criticism because of Jackson’s atrocities against Native Americans. Maybe Trump was referring to the way Jackson was not taken seriously early in his campaign, but more likely he meant Jackson’s reputation as a populist president, wrongfully denied the office he had earned through popular support when a rigged system gave the election to John Quincy Adams instead, afterward leading to his indisputable populist victory in the next election cycle and earning him the nickname King Mob. Indeed, this is a view of the election of 1824 promulgated by many historians, for although Jackson did not win a an electoral majority, he won a plurality, meaning he won more electoral votes than any other candidate, and unlike Trump, he also appears to have won the popular vote. Nevertheless, the House of Representatives voted in John Quincy Adams, which on its surface certainly does seem like a miscarriage of national politics, as they gave the office to a candidate with both fewer electoral votes and fewer votes generally. In reality, though, it’s not so clear that Jackson won the popular vote. Then, as today, it appears that many votes were suppressed, as entire counties worth of votes were not counted because they arrived late, or because when they did arrive, a certain seal that was required was missing. Furthermore, a lot of tallies of Jackson’s lead in the popular vote are calculated by which electors people voted for, that that is unreliable, as many electors appear to have been pledged to other candidates, like Clay or Crawford, but only gave their vote to Jackson later, which certainly doesn’t mean the people in those districts were voting to Jackson. And remember that number of votes from Southern states that supported Jackson are exaggerated by the Three-Fifths Compromise. Furthermore, the popular vote figures commonly cited today don’t even include states whose electors were chosen directly by their legislatures, including the extremely populous New York, which likely would have increased the popular vote count for John Quincy Adams since support for Jackson in New England was non-existent. So the idea that Andrew Jackson was such a clear winner may be something of a myth. But that’s not really the issue. Even if he were the clear winner of the popular vote, the fact that he didn’t get a majority of electoral votes meant that the House got to decide, in the proverbial smoke-filled room, with one vote per state, regardless of the will of the people. That’s how the Constitution was written, and that’s the problem.

This perceived “corrupt bargain” contributed to Jackson being swept into office in the next election, as depicted in the above public domain illustration.

The further problems with the Electoral College were apparent by this election of 1824. The Framers had expected states to choose electors on a district by district basis, such that not all electors in a state would vote for the same candidate, thus better representing the “sense of the people” as Alexander Hamilton put it, but many chose instead to use a winner-take-all system instead, and by 1836, all but one state had followed suit. The clear incentive to the winner-takes-all method was that a state’s influence in the Electoral College would be diluted if they allowed their electors to vote for various candidates. Then, of course, winner-takes-all politics contributed to the stranglehold of a two-party system, which in turn guaranteed that there would always be an electoral majority. After 1824, it has happened again four more times that a candidate won the office of president without receiving the most votes, and since the two most recent instances, 2000 and 2016, many have called for getting rid of the Electoral College. Predictably opposed to such a change, Constitutional purists, as always, tout the wisdom of the Framers of the Constitution, but in truth, the Electoral College did not turn out how the Framers envisioned. They did not anticipate winner-takes-all politics or a two-party system as we have it now, and further, they did not anticipate the apportionment of electors eventually providing an advantage to less populous states, such that now, per capita, voters in populous states like California have less clout than voters in, say, Wyoming, based on number of electors per voting-age citizen—about 200% less clout in fact. And the winner-takes-all system means empowers so-called “swing states,” encouraging candidates to cater to the issues of small populations just to ensure electoral college victory, while taking “safe states” for granted. Then of course there is the feeling of powerlessness in safe states when voting for a different candidate than most of the state. But getting rid of the Electoral College is more difficult than it sounds. It can’t be done by executive order, or ratification by the House or Senate alone. In fact it would take ratification by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, and then further ratification by 38 states! There are alternatives, though. Some states are entering into a compact to pledge their electors to whichever candidate wins the popular vote. If enough states entered this compact, it would eventually make the Electoral College something of a dead letter. Another option is ranked-choice voting, which, if states allowed it, could make it possible for third-party candidates to get a foothold and break through this two-party system.

Finally, as our last historical example of a contested American presidential election decided in an honest to God smoke-filled room, let’s look to 1876, the first incident of a candidate winning the popular vote but losing the election after 1824, for this was by far the most acrimonious and bitterly fought election in our history, and came close to ending in national chaos. The specter of the Civil War still haunted the country, with the surrender at Appomattox only a decade earlier and the chance at a peaceful reconciliation killed with President Lincoln at Ford Theater. Since then, the Radical wing of the Republican party had reigned supreme, controlling the North and also the South through Federal troops stationed there during Reconstruction, Northern opportunists called carpetbaggers who went South to profit from Reconstruction, and emancipated slaves. During this decade of punishment, white Southerners of the Democratic Party strove slowly but surely to wrest back political control of Southern states, in in 1876, it looked like they had a fighting chance. Ulysses S. Grant was concluding a final term marked by scandal and corruption, and for their candidate, the Democrats nominated Samuel J. Tilden, a Governor of New York known for fighting corruption and famously bringing the corrupt politician “Boss” Tweed to justice. The Republicans, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, ended up running a more moderate candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, the Governor of Ohio, whose nomination might be looked at as a concession to the South that had suffered under the Radical wing of their party. At this point, I would be remiss if I didn’t address the elephant in the room. At this time, the two-party system of Democrats and Republicans was in full swing, but it must be recognized that the parties then were entirely different than the parties now. This is a common bit of Historical Blindness we see paraded about quite often, such as when people say the Democratic Party of today is the party of the KKK and for proof they show pics of Southern Democrats in the late 19th century, or when Republicans today brag about their party being founded by Abraham Lincoln. Audio clips In fact, if you were comparing Lincoln to the modern Republican Party, one would have to say he was Republican in name only. You see, a funny thing happened about 20 years after this election, when the Democratic Party nominated William Jennings Bryan unsuccessfully three times, undergoing an ideological shift that focused more on economic populism, decrying the abuses of the wealthy against poor workers and farmers and seeking solutions through government intervention. This was the birth of the modern Democratic Party, and simultaneously, Republicans gained a foothold in the South, where they had long been seen as the party of carpetbaggers, such that complete reversal in the electoral map occurred in the early 20th century, with almost all the states that previously went to one party now being taken by the other. So don’t let the names fool you, the Republicans and Democrats of 1876 were not the R’s and D’s of today.

Public Domain portrait of Abraham Lincoln, perhaps the most well-known RINO in American history.

Outside of the names of the parties, though, there were some real parallels with the current election. The corruption of the incumbent was a central issue, and fake news played a major part. Republicans distorted the facts to damage Tilden’s reputation, suggesting he had actually been colluding with the racketeer “Boss” Tweed, and that he’s been a proponent of Confederate secession, when neither of these was the case. Dirty tricks were also rampant, such as Republicans printing ballots in some states that placed a Republican symbol above the names of Democratic candidates hoping to trick illiterate voters. Come election day, though, it appeared that Tilden had won regardless, with a confirmed 184 electoral votes to Hayes’s 166. Rutherford B. Hayes actually went to bed that night conceding his defeat to his advisors, though, importantly, not making a public concession. Overnight, however, Republican strategists saw a path to victory in the remaining 19 electoral votes of three Southern states, Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. After a series of telegrams to the Republican canvassing boards, who had the power to throw out ballots and certify votes. When these three states declared for Hayes, the Democrats asserted fraud and certified their own electors. The Senate would decide which votes were legitimate, but the Senate was controlled by Republicans and refused to let the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives have a say. It appeared to many that Republicans were in the process of stealing the presidency, and another civil war loomed. Militias mustered, performing drills and parades, and Democratic governors discussed the possibility of commanding their National Guard troops to install Tilden in the White House by force, while President Grant sent troops into Southern state capitals and prepared to send the Army against the forces of any rebel states. Thankfully, some cooler heads prevailed. Recognizing that neither a Senate nor a House decision in the matter would be satisfactory, an Electoral Commission was formed consisting of five Senators, five House representatives, and five Supreme Court Justices. They voted strictly along party lines and found in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes, 8 votes to 7. This might have done nothing to head off the conflict, if it hadn’t been for Tilden’s acceptance of the decision, and most historians agree that he only accepted it because of some private dealings in a smoke-filled room at the Wormley Hotel in Washington. There, a negotiation took place that conceded much to Southern Democrats if they would accept Hayes as their President, the foremost of these concessions being a promise to recall Federal troops from the South and effectively end Reconstruction.

There was even more to this so-called Compromise of 1877, including tacit promises to fund a railroad, appoint a Southern Postmaster General, provide financial assistance for Southern states, and, ominously, to let the South deal with its own problems of race. Historians like C. Van Woodward and others have questioned the importance of the meeting at the Wormley in the resolution of the election or have suggested that the compromise has been exaggerated by historians, especially since Southern Democrats might have gotten all they wanted with Tilden as President and since it seems Hayes ended up not keeping up his end of this bargain in several respects. But whatever was the case, we can certainly see that politicians of the day worked to avoid absolute catastrophe. I look back on this episode in history with some hope. If, God forbid, a modern election resulted in such an impasse, with questions of fraud, legitimate or fabricated, casting such doubt on the results that violence or disunion appear imminent—and make no mistake, with Qanon conspiracy theorists ready to declare revolution against an imaginary Deep State and white nationalist militias demonstrating their lack of compunction about storming capitol buildings with firearms, it is a real possibility—with a packed Supreme Court being so clearly partisan and the Senate and House dominated by different parties, I would hope that those with the reins of government will actually do their jobs and find a peaceful solution. While an Electoral Commission like that of 1877 is not strictly Constitutional, there is historical precedent for it, and it helped to give at least a semblance of impartiality to the resolution of that election. And if those who govern the people have to make shadowy dealings in a smoke-filled room in order to avoid bloodshed, as distasteful as that may be, it may still be preferable to the alternative.

Political cartoon from Harper’s Weekly

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When I wrote this, I was feeling more pessimistic than I feel now. My rather obvious prediction that Trump would contest the results with lawsuits that he hopes to bring before his Supreme Court has proven accurate, but now, with Biden declared President Elect by credible news outlets as well as by partisan networks, I am feeling more confident about a peaceful transition, regardless of Trump's tantrums. So far, threats of violence or disunion appear subdued and relegated to the fringe. This could change of course, but as it stands now, rather than hoping for some arcane bipartisan arbitration, I'm hopeful that Trump's baseless claims of election fraud will not be seriously entertained. And so far, this seems to be the case even among many who have previously enabled such rhetoric. One further concern could be faithless electors, that is electors who are pledged to give their Electoral College vote to a certain candidate but give it instead to another--yet one more serious problem with Electoral College. This leeway was meant to allow the wiser among us to prevent the election of demagogues that rise on a cult of personality, but clearly that check wasn't used in 2016. There was a record number of faithless electors that year, but some of them gave their vote to the demagogue when they were pledge to the other candidate! Some states have laws preventing the validation of faithless electoral votes, but many don't. Nevertheless, with the electoral lead that Biden has...is poised to have, the number of validated faithless electoral votes would have to be record-breaking--far more than the already historic 7 electors that defected from their pledged candidates in 2016. But while there may still be rocky shoals to avoid, it appears the ship of state has successfully entered safe harbor. Now it's time to reconcile with each other. 

Further Reading

Azari, Julia, and Marc J. Hetherington. “Back to the Future? What the Politics of the Late Nineteenth Century Can Tell Us about the 2016 Election.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 667, 2016, pp. 92–109. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24756145.  

Chang, Stanley. “Updating the Electoral College: The National Popular Vote Legislation.” Harvard Journal on Legislation, vol. 44, no. 1, 2007, pp. 205-229. Fairvote.org, archive.fairvote.org/media/documents/chang.pdf.

Heath, Brad. “'Dueling' electors, 'hanging chads': a history of contested U.S. elections.” Reuters, 23 Oct. 2020, www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-contested-examples/dueling-electors-hanging-chads-a-history-of-contested-u-s-elections-idUSKBN2781G4.

Kleber, Louis. “The Presidential Election of 1876.” History Today, vol. 20, no. 11, Nov. 1970. History Today, www.historytoday.com/archive/presidential-election-1876.

Peskin, Allan. “Was There a Compromise of 1877.” The Journal of American History, vol. 60, no. 1, 1973, pp. 63–75. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2936329.

Ratcliffe, Donald. “Popular Preferences in the Presidential Election of 1824.” Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 34, no. 1, 2014, pp. 45–77. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24486931.

A Rediscovery of Witches, Part Two: The Moon Goddess and the Cunning Folk

This is not a complete or accurate transcript of the podcast episode, as it does not include portions of my interview with Sarah Handley-Cousins.

According to Charles Godfrey Leland, as a child in Philadelphia, he had a Dutch nurse who was reputed to be a sorceress. One day, she carried him up into the attic of their home and performed a ceremony over him, placing a plate of salt with money and a lit candle by his head and laying a Bible, a key, and a knife on his little chest. Her ritual was meant to ensure that he would succeed in life as a scholar and as a wizard. The truth of this episode is impossible to determine, but indeed, Leland grew up to attend Princeton, study linguistics, and write numerous books about the traditional poetry and folklore of the Algonquian people and the Romany, or as he called them, Gypsies. Certainly the story of his early dedication to wizardry complements the eventual direction of his interests, which tended toward the occult. He spent a great deal of time traveling around Europe, especially Tuscany, and produced a volume in 1891 called Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling. One of his principal sources was a woman named Maddalena, an Italian fortune teller whom Leland called his “witch informant.” From her, he received a manuscript, written in her own hand, that purported to lay out the doctrines of an ancient religion in Italy, what Leland believed to be the tenets of Italian witchcraft going back to antiquity. In prose poetry which Leland translated and expanded upon, Aradia, the Gospel of the Witches, as he called it, revealed that those persecuted as witches by the Church in early modern times were in fact a cult to the goddess of the moon, Diana, theirs was a religion of the oppressed or the outcast, revenging themselves upon the feudal lords who did them wrong and holding naked orgies in worship of Diana, which rites were mistaken by the Church as gatherings to worship the devil. The book had Judeo-Christian parallels, for in it, it was said Diana and her brother, Luciferus, the god of the sun, had a daughter named Aradia, whom they sent to earth to be the leader of the witches. Leland’s book proved to be relatively obscure, but after the spread of Margaret Murray’s witch-cult hypothesis, it was rediscovered by some and raised as proof of Murray’s thesis. The problem is, scholars like Ronald Hutton have cast doubt on its authenticity. It is fundamentally different from medieval texts derived from ancient Latin works, Hutton argues, and appears to be of 19th century origin. As it was said to have been written in Maddalena’s own hand, some have suggested that Leland’s witch informant had hoaxed him, while others have suggested that Leland himself authored the work, making it a literary fraud. Whatever the case, there is certainly no evidence beyond the book of the organized religion it describes.

Margaret Murray, who later propagated the myth that women accused of witchcraft were actually observing a secret religion, wasn’t working in a vacuum when she formulated her witch-cult theory. As I noted, she was influenced most notably by the comparative religion work of James Frazer. But she also wasn’t the first to suggest the idea that the witches of early modern persecutions in Europe were actually pagan cultists. However, Leland’s book doesn’t appear to have been an influence on Murray. Its claims were very different. It made no assertions that the Italian witchcraft it described was a pan-European religion, and nowhere was the Horned God of Murray worshipped. In her earlier work, Murray did acknowledge Diana as a goddess the witches worshipped, but she suggested that it was really Janus, the Roman god of passages, rather than Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt. She, of course, had in mind the medieval canon law called Canon Episcopi, which described the existence of “some unconstrained women, perverted by Satan, seduced by illusions and phantasms of demons, [who] believe and openly profess that, in the dead of night, they ride upon certain beasts with the pagan goddess Diana, with a countless horde of women, and in the silence of the dead of the night to fly over vast tracts of country, and to obey her commands as their mistress, and to be summoned to her service on other nights.” This canon law was claimed to be from the 4th century CE, but many scholars believe it to have been a medieval forgery dating to the 10th century. This was the law that had encouraged more lenient treatment of witches as people with erroneous beliefs, who had been misled to believe that their dreams of night flights with Diana were real, a view reversed by the time of Pope Innocent VIII’s bull declaring them to be real devil worshipers. But even if it only dated to the 900s, where did this idea of women worshiping Diana come from? And was this the same Diana described in Leland’s Aradia?

Depiction of the goddess Diana portraying all her associations with hunting, the moon, and night flight. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

It seems that what the Canon Episcopi was describing was a certain strain of folklore, and as usual, when delving into the development of folklore, it is a story of syncretism, or the merging of beliefs. For instance, the Roman goddess Diana was not the goddess of the moon but of the hunt, with perhaps some association with the sky or daylight if one can judge by the etymology of her name. However, through identification with the Greek goddess of the hunt, Artemis, she inherited associations with Selene, the goddess of the moon, and Hecate, the queen of the dead. Hecate’s rides with the unquiet dead, which became all mixed up with Northern European folklore about the Wild Hunt, may be the basis for the idea of night rides with Diana, and may also be the point of intersection between these goddess traditions and folklore about faeries, creatures whom Diana leads in her rides, much as Hecate leads a host of the dead or Odin leads a host of faeries from the underworld in his Wild Hunt. In order to account for the strange creatures described in witchcraft trials as demons, Margaret Murray came up with an unusual explanation that again shows how she leapt to absurd and unsupported extremes in reaching for some interpretation that could make the witch narratives both real and rationally explainable. She suggested that faeries, styled as demons by witch-hunters, were really a now extinct race of diminutive people, like pygmies. But lacking substantive support for such a theory, I think we can just look at it quizzically for a moment before moving on. Another strange bit of syncretism in this folklore derives from the Old Testament. Some versions of the Wild Hunt folklore motif associated it with Herod the Great’s hunt for the “Holy Innocents” who might become the prophesied King of the Jews. And strangely, Diana appears to be strongly syncretized with Herodias, wife of Herod the Great’s youngest son, Herod Antipas, who convinced her daughter Salome to ask King Herod for John the Baptist’s head on a platter as reward for a particularly alluring dance she’d performed. According to legend, once the deed was done, Salome was remorseful, and a powerful wind blew from the murdered saint’s mouth, blowing her into the sky where she was doomed to fly forever. Salome seems to have become identified with her mother, so that it was said Herodias was the legendary flying dancer, and some used Herodias’s name or some derivative of it, like Aradia, as being synonymous with the pagan goddess Diana. As usual when I delve into folklore, I come out with my head spinning, but what can we take from all this? Despite a throughline of folklore that might help us identify the myth of Diana associated with witchcraft, there remains no evidence of a widespread religion devoted to her worship. What may be more likely is that, as folklore, these myths were passed as oral traditions, and the medieval church first misunderstood these tales to be real experiences that their tellers believed they were having, and later that the stories were real indeed. And even if women of the age occasionally got together and acted out the legends of Diana/Herodias, it would not been an organized revival of pagan religion but rather a reenactment of a popular folktale. These notions would, however, be involved in just such a revival but centuries after the early modern witch purges.  

In 1951, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was finally repealed in Great Britain, replaced by Parliament with the Fraudulent Mediums Act, and almost immediately, a man named Gerald Gardner began to give interviews with the press claiming that he was a practicing witch, carrying on an age-old tradition of witchcraft. Gardner was a colonialist, having made his fortune operating rubber and tea plantations on the Malay peninsula. After retiring to England in 1936, he took the interest he had developed in Malay tribal magical practices and applied it to the field of folklore, writing a number of monographs. Once there was no longer a law against such claims, he let it be known that there existed a coven of witches in the New Forest district of Hampshire who had initiated him into their old religion. He named a certain local woman, Dorothy Clutterbuck, as the leader of the coven, and his favorite story about her coven was that they had engaged in magical battle against Hitler, gathering numerous covens to New Forest for what was called “Operation Cone of Power.” This was an ancient and powerful spell which had previously been directed against Napoleon, and before that against the Spanish Armada. The witches danced nude in the cold night with such abandon in casting this spell that some of them died of exposure or exhaustion. This coven’s rites involved much in the way of naked dancing as well as circle rituals and feasting, much of it for the purpose of promoting fertility and to achieve trance states that brought them closer to their gods. As Gardner described this religion in his book Witchcraft Today a few years later, they worshipped two gods in a duotheistic system. One was the Horned God described by Margaret Murray, while the other was the Goddess of the Moon described by Charles Godfrey Leland. While Murray had envisioned her witch-cult as a patriarchal system led by male priests, despite her feminism, Gardner described a more feministic secret witch-cult, and it is Gardner’s work in bringing this ancient witches’ religion to light that serves as the foundation for the modern religion of Wicca and neopagan beliefs generally. But how much truth was there to what Gardner taught?

Gerald Gardner, via Fortean Picture Library

First, consider the source of Gardner’s knowledge. Scholarly historians, such as Ronald Hutton, have investigated Gardner’s claims extensively and concluded that they seem very unlikely. The woman he claimed inducted him, Dorothy Clutterbuck, appears to have been a pious Christian and conservative Tory pillar of the community, which would indicate that she lived quite a double life if true. Only one other person has been recorded as claiming to have known about the coven and its operation against Hitler, but he told of it after Gardner himself had and may have just been repeating the story as he’d heard it. There were reports that Aleister Crowley, when Gardner met him, confirmed the existence of the New Forest coven, which would seem a strange thing to need confirmed if Gardner had been initiated as he claimed, but Crowley’s diaries and other accounts of their meeting don’t mention this. What they do show is that Gardner came to him and exaggerated his academic credentials and Masonic clout, hoping to get Crowley to initiate him into the magical secret society Ordo Templi Orientis, with no such luck, as Crowley doesn’t appear to have thought much of him. What seems likeliest is that he was searching for some occult initiation to make his retirement more interesting, first in the Folk-Lore Society, then in a Rosicrucian Theater he joined, and afterward in Crowley’s order or other mystical societies, like the Order of the Golden Dawn or the Ancient Druid Order, both of which he dabbled in, and when he failed, he simply created his own brand of magical order. He made up a supposedly ancient witchcraft religion, perhaps as a prank suggesting a stodgy old woman he knew of, who had since passed away, had inducted him into her coven’s mysteries. By mashing up the work of Leland and Murray, he produced their doctrines, and for rituals he cherry picked whatever suited his fancy from those two sources, including nudity and sexual cavorting, and added some that seem to be more of his own practices, such as flagellation to produce ecstasies or hallucinations. Certainly as the religion developed, it became clear that the writings he claimed were ancient were actually, at least in part, written by him, for when a High Priestess he had initiated into his feministic religion later tried to take the reins, he conveniently produced a new discovery of supposedly ancient rules that clarified the power he as a man should have over the women in his coven, making it more of a patriarchy after all. Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t begrudge neopagans or Wiccans the conviction of their beliefs or the freedom to express them by whatever observance they wish—as the Wiccan tenet goes, “An it harm none, do what thou wilt”—but I cannot pretend that the historical basis for the faith is any more valid than, say, that of Mormonism, or of Scientology, another religion fabricated by an acquaintance of Aleister Crowley.

Thus we have more than one myth borne out of Margaret Murray’s discredited work. First, her own myth of a pan-European pagan fertility cult mistaken for Satanists by their persecutors, and then, Gerald Gardner’s derivative neopagan religion of Wicca, claiming to be a continuation of an ancient religion that had been practiced in secret into modern times. Next came the myth that most women accused of being witches were practicing midwives, whose knowledge of medicine was feared and misunderstood as magic. But this myth did not originate from Murray. As with many descriptions of the witch, it was spread in early modern Europe by Heinrich Kramer’s book, the Malleus Maleficarum, which described midwives as the being in the perfect position to take newborns and offer their souls to the devil, or to take them for sacrifice. As we have already seen, Murray relied heavily on the Hammer of the Witches as a primary source for her interpretation, rationalizing what seemed outrageous and taking what pleased her at face value. As it went well with her theory, she argued in her characteristically assertive style that the female worshippers of her imagined fertility cult were also practicing midwives with medical expertise. This argument would be taken up again in the 1970s by second-wave feminists and as a result would be presumed true by many. In an effort to address the sexual politics and history of the marginalization of women in medicine, sociologists and social critics Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English latched on to the Murray’s claims about midwifery’s connection to witchcraft allegations in their pamphlet “Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers,” and from there it spread. It would not be challenged as a myth until 1990, when medical historian David Harley wrote his article “Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-witch.” In his article, Harley revealed that it was actually relatively uncommon for midwives to be accused of witchcraft, as they were usually considered trustworthy women.

Witches dancing with devils, featured in The History of Witches and Wizards (1720), via Wellcome Library

While it may be a myth that midwives were common targets of witchcraft accusations, what about female healers generally? Historians have revealed to us the presence in early modern Europe of a class of folk healers whose folk medicine essentially was spellcraft, and there has long been a view both popular and scholarly that it was these wise men and women, or cunning folk, who were most commonly persecuted as witches. The problem is that this too appears to be a misconception propagated by 1970s scholarship that has since been challenged, specifically a 1979 article called “Who Were the Witches?” by Richard Horsley in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. To clarify, cunning folk were practitioners of operative magic, meaning they performed services such as creating charms to cure people and livestock or acted as diviners for hire, telling the fortunes of those who paid them. Theirs was an especially practical magic, sought out in rural areas as a remedy to misfortunes that were believed to have been caused by evil magic or curses, counteracting black magic with white magic, as it were. I have given an apt example of cunning folk being accused of witchcraft in the famous case of the Pendle Witches in Lancaster, England, in a recent Patreon exclusive podcast episode. Because of prominent cases like these and the simple logic behind the proposition that it was practitioners of magic who were being accused of witchcraft, like the midwife-witch myth, the notion is easy to believe. I myself am guilty of having repeated the claim on previous episodes of this podcast. The problem is that there the evidence doesn’t allow for so grand a generalization. First of all, as we see in the Pendle Witches trial, much of the folk magic performed by cunning folk was widely considered a good magic and involved explicitly Catholic ritual elements—in fact, in his 1994 article in Social History, “Witch Doctors, Soothsayers and Priests: On Cunning Folk in European Historiography and Tradition,” Willem de Blécourt points out that there were even Catholic clergymen who dabbled in folk magic as well. The cunning folk certainly were not part of a pagan cult holding meetings. Historical records show they were almost invariably solitary figures, practicing extremely individualized rituals. Some may have been engaged in cursing those who had wronged them, as we see among the Pendle Witches, but those who were accused of evil magic, or maleficium, may have just been dealing with dissatisfied customers. If one hired a good witch to heal a family member or some livestock and instead of being healed their condition worsened, one might presume the charm they had worked was actually a curse. But the most problematic aspect of the cunning folk as witches claim is that it ignores the majority of the accused, who don’t appear to have engaged in the selling of magical services at all.

So let us look at what was behind the accusations against those who were not admitted practitioners of folk magic. First, there were those who were assumed to have been practicing maleficium because they had given someone an odd look or even a harsh word and afterward by coincidence some misfortune had befallen the person they’d looked at or dealt with unpleasantly, as we see was the case with Alizon Device, the first of the accused Pendle Witches. Among these, being socially isolated made the accusation harder to refute, for if no one knew you well, imaginations could run wild about what you believed and what you did with your time. And of course, witchcraft allegations as mechanism for revenge played a role in many cases as well, for when one saw that the charge of witchcraft brought someone, even an innocent, to ruin and death, what better way destroy an enemy? As for the confessions of the accused, as alluded to before, we know enough now about coercion and the effects of torture to easily explain these. In fact, some scholars have even examined the differences in confessions given under different types of torture, such as physical torment as opposed to sleep deprivation, and observed that the confessions take on a different quality of detail, with those elicited by physical torture being brief and without detail, as if blurted out to stop the pain, and those produced by sleep deprivation being more dreamlike, as though from the description of a hallucination. Nor can we discount the mere threat of torture as a driving factor behind the confessions. The details may clearly have been fed to the accused by their torturers, or they may have been gleaned from common knowledge of what witches were being accused of. The witch craze happened to coincide with a revolution in publishing that resulted in the spread of cheap publications detailing witch trials, featuring woodcuts that depicted what witches were supposedly up to so that even the illiterate acquired a working knowledge of the claims. Many accused witches hoped that by confessing to their accusers and saying they repented, the inquisitors and magistrates would have mercy on them, which certainly worked for some of them. And others, as mentioned earlier, may have simply been describing folk stories about Diana and her night rides in such a way that witch-hunters may have taken it for an admission of first-hand experience when it was only an oral tradition. Wherein lies the reality? Likely in some combination of all these scenarios.

Witches feasting, featured in The History of Witches and Wizards (1720), via Wellcome Library

The question remaining, then, is what drove the witch-hunters themselves? Typically they are depicted as zealots, unable to see past the tips of their noses, which they’d buried in the Bible. Certainly it is hard to refute that this was the case, but in recent times a more nuanced view of their motivations has emerged. The papal bull of Pope Innocent VIII that is seen as the beginning of the early modern witch craze explicitly accuses witches of having “blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees.” This has led some historians to suggest that the real impetus behind the witch craze was climate change, specifically the Little Ice Age that cooled Europe starting as early as 1250, causing many crops to fail. As the human mind is hardwired to find someone to blame for things that are outside our control, a scapegoat was sought, and witches fit the bill. Another theory has it that the worst of the witch purges occurred in places where civil authority was relatively weak, and the execution of outsiders as witches served as a show of strength to consolidate power and enforce social conformity. But recently, in 2018, two economists, Peter Leeson and Jacob Russ, put forward a different theory, based on statistical analysis. They claim that the evidence supports the idea that the early modern witch-craze was triggered by the Protestant Reformation. By their view, the Catholic and Protestant Churches engaged in witch purges as a kind of advertisement for their respective brands of religion, each demonstrating through their witch trials their power over the devil as well as their willingness to use violence against those who rejected their faith. This may seem like conspiratorial thinking, but this could be true even without an organized conspiracy to knowingly make false accusations against and put to death innocents. Economic forces may be at work without conscious knowledge of them, and furthermore, these economic motivators may have been working in combination with the people’s desire to scapegoat for failed crops and weak governments needing to enforce their authority. As I have shown time and time again, it is more the domain of conspiracist thinking to oversimplify very complicated episodes in history in order to create a tidy explanation at which one can point an accusatory finger.

Further Reading

Crabb, Jon. “Woodcuts and Witches.” The Public Domain Review, 4 May 2017, publicdomainreview.org/essay/woodcuts-and-witches.

De Blécourt, Willem. “Witch Doctors, Soothsayers and Priests. On Cunning Folk in European Historiography and Tradition.” Social History, vol. 19, no. 3, 1994, pp. 285–303. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4286217.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives, & Nurses (Second Edition) : A History of Women Healers. Vol. 2nd ed, The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2010. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=597965&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Harley, David. “Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-witch.” Social History of Medicine, vol. 3, no. 1, April 1990, pp. 1–26. Oxford Academic,  doi.org/10.1093/shm/3.1.1.

Hutton, Ronald. “Paganism and Polemic: The Debate over the Origins of Modern Pagan Witchcraft.” Folklore, vol. 111, no. 1, 2000, pp. 103–117. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1260981.

———. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford University Press, 1999.

Leeson, Peter T., and Jacob W. Russ. “Witch Trials.” The Economic Journal, vol. 128, Aug. 2018, pp. 2066-2105. PeterLeeson.com, www.peterleeson.com/Papers.html.

Magliocco, Sabina. “Who Was Aradia? The History and Development of a Legend.” The Pomegranate: The Journal of Pagan Studies, no. 18, Feb. 2002. The Wayback Machine, web.archive.org/web/20070717043727/http://chass.colostate-pueblo.edu/natrel/pom/pom18/aradia.html.

Murray, Margaret Alice. The God of the Witches. Blackmask Online, 2001. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/godwitch/mode/2up.

———. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. Oxford University Press, 1921. Project Gutenburg, www.gutenberg.org/files/20411/20411-h/20411-h.htm.

A Rediscovery of Witches, Part One: The Hammer and the Horned God

This transcript is incomplete. It does not contain material from my interview with Sarah Handley-Cousins of Dig: A History Podcast. Listen to the episode for more.

Last October I explored the origins of the legend of werewolves, and during the course of that exploration, I was obliged to speak about accusations of witchcraft, as the two were intimately connected. Among all the iconic monsters that appear this time of year on dollar-store decorations, the vampire, the werewolf, and witches, it is the witch that people generally know has some basis in history and truth, as it is common knowledge that large numbers of accused witches were put to death, both here in America in New England and across Europe in the early modern period. But what do we really know about the women, and men, accused of witchcraft and what led to their trials? Is there any historical evidence to suggest that these people had actually done anything we might today think of as witchy? Or was it a moral panic that claimed the lives of many who were completely innocent? If so, what touched off this panic? Who and what were these accused witches, really, and why did they end up burned and hanged? You probably think you know the answers to these questions, but you may be surprised. For example, belief in witches may go all the way back to antiquity, when those believed to practice sorcery, incantations, and poisoning were punished under the law in many lands. However, it seems lesser known that during the Middle Ages, with the Christianization of Europe, authorities both divine and secular passed laws against persecuting others for witchcraft and even denied its existence. Medieval canon law declared that any who believed they did such things as witches were commonly accused of doing, such as riding on beasts by night in the train of the pagan goddess Diana, had simply been deluded by the devil to believe their dreams were real. A number of Catholic Popes expressly forbade the torturing and executing of those accused of witchcraft, such as Pope Nicholas I and Pope Gregory VII. However, by the 13th century, the Catholic Church’s Holy Inquisition was involved in crusades against heretics in France, the Cathars and Waldensians, and the accusations of devil worship leveled against them as well as their brutal extirpation hearkened back to witch purges of the past and presaged the witch-hunts to come. Even so, as late as 1258, Pope Alexander IV declared a bull that prohibited Inquisitors from investigating sorcery. A couple hundred years later, though, the Catholic Church essentially invented the idea of the witch as we know it today, not as a simple sorcerer or diviner or a pagan worshipper but as a servant of Satan, when they combined witchcraft accusations with accusations of heresy. Many see its beginnings in the late 15th century, when Pope Innocent VIII issued an infamous bull that acknowledged the existence of real witchcraft—not just dreams or visions but real sorcery—and empowered the Inquisition to prosecute its practitioners. We don’t know for certain the exact number of people tried and executed for witchcraft by the Holy Inquisition in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, but surviving records indicate that around 40,000 were killed. Who were the accused? And what led to the accusations made against them?

I have always covered something a bit spooky around Halloween. In 2018, I spoke about Spring-Heeled Jack and the Devil’s Footprints in Devon, but most of my other Halloween episodes have really focused on moral panics having to do with accusations of monstrous behavior, and these episodes really culminate, I feel, with this series. At the end of my first year of podcasting, I did a 2-part series on the history of false accusations of devil worship, and last year, I did another 2-part series on werewolf trials. I’m proud of both of those and encourage you to listen to them this October if you’ve never heard them. The topic also flows well from episodes I’ve done this year. Starting with the patron exclusive I did on the suppression of the Knights Templar, and through my discussion of the supposed origin of magic and my look at heresy and heterodoxy in the Apocrypha, I can see a thread. My discussion of anti-Semitism through the ages certainly serves as a parallel to the witch-hunts I will be discussing, and even my series on Mary, Queen of Scots connects, for her son, James, as king, wrote his own book on witchcraft justifying the prosecution of witches under canon law. I even see a direct connection to my last episode, in which I drew a connection between Qanon conspiracy theories and longstanding conspiracy theories about the Illuminati. To clarify, the accusations made by Qanon believers owe a lot to witchcraft accusations, for they claim that the deep state is run by devil-worshipers who torture and kill children in order to harvest from them adrenochrome, a drug they enjoy, or simply to eat them. Anyone who has studied witchcraft accusations recognizes these claims. Witches were also accused of being devil-worshipers who ate children or sacrificed them or harvested fat from them to make their hallucinogenic flying ointment. One could argue in fact that Qanon is just another witch-hunt. But despite the progression from topics I’ve covered this year and throughout the lifetime of the show, I have found the witch-hunts of early modern Europe very difficult to parse and wrap my mind around. First of all, it feels wrong, somehow, to question what these women’s lives were like, what they might have done, for neighbors or authorities to target them for prosecution as witches, as if I’m engaging in victim-blaming, yet the more I look into this topic, the more a cut-and-dry claim that all accusations had sprung from the fevered imaginations of Inquisitors seems untenable. Yet neither can I entertain the notion that witch-hunters were justified in their prosecutions. So we must consider all sides… what did the Inquisitors believe of the accused, and what different views of them have historians taken, and what theories are there for why the witch purges of early modern Europe happened.

The 1669 edition of the Malleus Maleficarum. Public Domain image, via Wikimedia Commons.

To understand how witches were defined in early modern Europe and made into the perennial horror icons we know today, we must look to the writings of one true believer, Dominican monk and Inquisitor Heinrich Kramer. Early in his career, this Inquisitor undertook a witch-hunt at Innsbruck, where a certain woman suspected of witchcraft challenged his authority, spitting on him in the street, calling him a “bad monk,” refusing to attend his sermons and suggesting that, because of his own rabid belief in literal witchcraft, he was the one in league with Satan. This set Kramer off on a rampage of a witch purge, putting this woman and others on trial not so much for practicing sorcery, although there were rumors of this, but rather for their sexual behavior, which he asserted proved that they worshipped and engaged in sexual contact with the devil. The local Bishop, however, disagreed, finding that Kramer asked leading questions, “presumed much that had not been proved,” and “clearly demonstrated his foolishness.” After the trial had been vacated, Kramer went home and stewed over it, and ended up, as a defense of his actions and a rebuttal to his critics, writing what turned out to be the most infamous witch-hunting manual of the era, the Malleus Maleficarum, or “Hammer of the Witches.” Kramer’s was not the only witch-hunting manual used during the early modern witch-hunts, but it was the most influential in German-speaking regions, and this was the heart of the witch purges that followed, with a majority of the prosecutions taking place within 300 miles of the Rhineland city of Strasbourg (Leeson and Russ 2067). The Malleus Maleficarum serves as the perfect source for understanding the conception of witchcraft that became dominant during the ensuing witch craze. Although witchcraft had long been thought of as a practice of both men and women, and indeed, during the early modern panic, men too were accused and executed for it, for Kramer, witches were women. As at Innsbruck, Kramer blamed what he perceived as their lustful nature, as well as their supposed intellectual weakness, for their susceptibility to the devil’s charms. A witch, he argued, was not simply a woman who performs magic. To be considered a witch, they have to “deny  the  Catholic  faith  in  whole  or  in part through verbal sacrilege, to devote themselves body and soul [to the devil], to  offer  up  to  the  Evil  One  himself  infants  not  yet  baptized, and  to  persist  in diabolic filthiness through carnal acts with incubus and succubus demons.” So we see these motifs, of sex with demons and the sacrifice of babies, not entering the discourse for the first time, but here cemented in a definition with criteria. And since, according to this definition, they were essentially heretics, he recommended torture in their prosecution and encouraged that they be burned at the stake, both standard Inquisitorial practices for rooting out heresy.

To think of Kramer’s understanding of witches as an artifact of a dark age of ignorance that disappeared with the Enlightenment would be erroneous, though, for even in the 20th century, at least one erudite and scholarly writer was giving them credence. The first English translation of the Malleus Maleficarum was published in 1928 by Montague Summers, a Catholic writer who perpetuated the witch-hunting manual’s notions as legitimate and true. In his books on witches, werewolves, and vampires, he presented the accusations of Inquisitors as completely reliable, even the supernatural parts. But more than this, he painted the picture of witchcraft practitioners as a vast conspiracy like unto the Illuminati, describing the witch as

an evil liver; a social pest and parasite; the devotee of a loathly and obscene creed; an adept at poisoning, blackmail, and other creeping crimes; a member of a powerful secret organisation inimical to Church and State; a blasphemer in word and deed, swaying the villagers by terror and superstition; a charlatan and a quack sometimes; a bawd; an abortionist; the dark counsellor of lewd court ladies and adulterous gallants; a minister to vice and inconceivable corruption, battening upon the filth and foulest passions of the age.

Also like believers in an Illuminati conspiracy, he saw the Bolsheviks as a parallel, and even suggested that the actions of Inquisitors against such a conspiracy were justified, writing, “who can be surprised if, when faced with so vast a conspiracy, the methods employed by the Holy Office may not seem – if the terrible conditions are conveniently forgotten – a little drastic, a little severe?” And while acknowledging the misogyny of Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum, he makes the loathsome suggestion that such persecution might be just what was needed for the women of his own day, stating, “I am not altogether certain that they will not prove a wholesome and needful antidote in this feministic age, when the sexes seem confounded, and it appears to be the chief object of many females to ape the man, an indecorum by which they…divest themselves of such charm as they might boast.”

Photo of Montague Summers, attributed to DiscipulusMundi on WIkimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Regardless of his politics or misogyny, what is so striking about Montague Summers is that, as an Oxford educated man about town and fixture of the London literary scene, he actually believed the irrational things he claimed to believe. One might blame this on his religious background, but his religiosity may have been an affectation. He was ordained a deacon in the Anglican Church, but after a scandal in which he was accused of sexually assaulting boys, his career in the church came to an end. He converted to Catholicism after that and appears to have pursued ordination as a priest so single-mindedly that he travelled to Italy in search of a Cardinal who would be willing to ordain him in an unorthodox ceremony. So it seemed the pretension of being a clergyman was more important to him than any doctrine or faith. He was known to go about town in a cape and the black felt shovel hat typical of clergymen, presenting himself like an 18th-century Inquisitor. In fact, his interest in witchcraft too may have been an affectation. Originally, he had made a name for himself as a scholar of Restoration theater. After being approached by a publisher who requested he write a volume on the occult, Summers wrote the first work in what would end up being a large body of work on the topic, and after his first, more academic treatments of the topic, he pivoted into works on the occult aimed at popular audiences, and even into writing Gothic horror fiction. Montague Summers was a contemporary and acquaintance of Aleister Crowley, and it may be that he was influenced by Crowley’s own cultivation of a public image as an occultist and warlock. Some contemporaries believed Summers was himself an occultist and that he wrote of such things from experience, but based on Summers’s surviving letters and his work, it is much more likely that he had been attempting to cultivate an image of himself as a counterpart to Crowley, a modern witch-hunter to Crowley’s modern witch. On Montague Summers’s gravestone, the epitaph reads “Tell me strange stories,” and this suggests that, rather than being a true believer, perhaps he simply enjoyed a good dark tale, as do so many of us.

Bust of Margaret Murray housed at UCL Institute of Archaeology. Photo attributed to Midnightblueowl on Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA-3.0)

The case of Montague Summers mirrors in some ways the case of another academic, a contemporary of his, who spread a different, more rational view of the nature of witches, but whose view was no less problematic, whose methods were flawed in some of the same ways, and whose career followed a comparable trajectory. Her name was Margaret Murray. Essentially, Margaret Murray too believed that the women accused of witchcraft in early modern witch trials were part of a kind of vast conspiracy in that she asserted they were actually secretly practitioners of an ancient pagan fertility cult that operated like a secret society in Christian Europe. Yet her theory stands in opposition to Montague Summers’s, for she approached the subject of witches with a more skeptical and rational perspective. She claimed that everything witch-trial records spoke of witches doing had really been done, but had been misunderstood or misrepresented by prosecutors. Her theory evolved from her first book, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, to her follow-up, The God of the Witches. At first, working from reports of witches being deluded by the devil into the worship of a goddess named Diana, she suggested this Diana was actually the ancient Roman two-faced male deity, Janus. In her later work, though, influenced by the comparative mythology work of James Frazer in The Golden Bough, she identified their deity with the “Horned God,” who had been mistaken for the devil by witch-hunters, but was really a representation of a syncretistic deity that could be found in many cultures, stretching back to the Ancient Greek Pan. Murray believed that a male priest or authority figure wore some headdress to act as a stand-in for their Horned God, and performed these sexual acts on the female adherents of the cult, using a prosthetic phallus when the physical demands were too much. And again drawing on James Frazer’s work, which identified the figure of the sacred king who must atone for his people as a sacrifice, she suggested this male figure was ritualistically or at least symbolically burned , which could be discerned in witch confessions that spoke of the devil disappearing in flames, and in the ultimate reversal of what is generally believed about early modern witch-hunts, she claimed that these pagan cultists actually provoked Christians into burning them alive in order to imitate their Dying God and effect the human sacrifice their cult required.

At first, the theory seemed promising in its rational view and even believable, and it spread widely when in 1929, Murray was invited to write Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry on witchcraft and took the opportunity to present her theory as if it were historical consensus or fact. But it was not, for there were real problems with her ideas and her methods. For example, Murray cited witch trial records that recorded confessions describing intercourse with the devil as being cold as her only evidence that her cult’s priests used prosthetic phalluses for their ceremonies… and her insistence that descriptions of the devil disappearing in flames were proof of their burning sacrifice of their Horned God effigy seems a bit ridiculous since the association of the devil with the flames of hell seems a clearer origin for such details. So ironically, her supposedly rationalist view of witchcraft suffered from the one of very same problems as Montague Summers’ work. She presumed that the acts confessed to under duress had actually taken place. She may have sought a different, more naturalistic interpretation of the lurid descriptions than witch persecutors and Summers had taken, but she never stopped to ask whether the accused may have just been telling the witch-hunters what they demanded to hear.

A photo of the Dorset Ooser, a wooden head or mask of uncertain origin used in folk traditions in Dorset. This is one of many unconnected examples cited by Murray as support for her theory of a cult to a Horned God. Public Domain in the U.S., via Wikipedia.

Among the many criticisms of her work were doubts expressed about her “dubious etymology” in suggesting that the name Diana was derived from Janus, or that the word “sabbath,” used by witch-hunters and in the confessions of the accused to refer to their gatherings and rituals, was not used in mockery of Jewish customs, as was commonly believed, but must have been derived from a word for “frolic,” even though elsewhere in her own work she takes no issue with the Jewish term “synagogue” being used to refer to witches’ gatherings. Her principal historiological sins are that she was supremely selective in her use of primary sources, quoting only that which supported her claims and omitting all else, and she presents even her wildest assertions as if they were so clear and obvious as to be unquestionable. This quote from Jacqueline Simpson’s article on Murray in Folklore paints a clearer picture of her scholarship, criticizing the

…inclusion of many chunks of miscellaneous material from a huge variety of periods and cultures, flung together in a hotchpotch where a paleolithic cave painting, an Egyptian mask and the Dorset Ooser all are said to represent the same Horned God, and where Robin Hood, fairies, scrying, Merlin, Norse seers and Celtic saints are all swept up into the discussion. Precisely because the material is so diverse, the links so tenuous and the tone so dogmatic, untrained readers are naturally mystified, and assume that their own limited knowledge is at fault; overawed, they feel themselves to be in the presence of great scholarship which they dare not query. Her books, alas, are not alone in profiting from this effect.

This method and the reliance on dubious etymology reminds me of the style of another writer who argued that pagan traditions had secretly survived in modern times: the anti-Catholic conspiracy theorist Alexander Hislop, who in his book The Two Babylons argued that Catholicism was just a collection of pagan traditions from antiquity. Have a listen to my episode on him and his work, A Tale of Two Babylons, and I’m sure you’ll recognize the similarity.

It seems to me that, much like Montague Summers, Margaret Murray may have been bewitched, if you’ll excuse the pun, by the popularity of her work on witches and the prospect of further success among general audiences. Certainly, when academic historians and folklorists are generous enough to afford her any praise, it’s usually for her early work and not for her later books, which are generally considered to have gone entirely off the rails. Yet her work has had a major impact among feminists. And beyond the spread of her peculiar myth of a pagan cult in Western Europe persecuted as devil-worshippers by Christians, her work also contributed to other historical myths related to the nature of witches. We’ll discuss these further developments next time, in part two of A Rediscovery of Witches, and we’ll get down to brass tacks in discussing whether witches really were practicing some kind of magic, and what other reasons may have led to accusations of witchcraft in early modern Europe.

Further Reading

Broedel, Hans Peter. The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief. Manchester University Press, 2003. OAPEN, library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/35002.

Clack, Beverly. “Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger 1486.” Misogyny in the Western Philosophical Tradition, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999, pp. 83-92. Springer Link, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230212800_7.

Herzig, Tamar. "Witches, Saints, and Heretics: Heinrich Kramer’s Ties with Italian Women Mystics." Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, vol. 1 no. 1, 2006, p. 24-55. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/mrw.0.0038.

Hume, Robert D. “The Uses of Montague Summers: A Pioneer Reconsidered.” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, vol. 3, no. 2, 1979, pp. 59–65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43291376. Accessed 30 Sept. 2020.

Murray, Margaret Alice. The God of the Witches. Blackmask Online, 2001. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/godwitch/mode/2up.

———. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. Oxford University Press, 1921. Project Gutenburg, www.gutenberg.org/files/20411/20411-h/20411-h.htm.

Regal, Brian. “The Occult Life of Montague Summers.” Fortean Times, January 2017. Magzter, www.magzter.com/article/Entertainment/Fortean-Times/The-Occult-Life-of-Montague-Summers.

Simpson, Jacqueline. “Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why?” Folklore, vol. 105, 1994, pp. 89–96. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1260633. Accessed 14 Oct. 2020.

The Illuminati Illuminated, Part Two: The Order in America

As conspiracy theories about an American “deep state” have spread and gone viral over the last four years, they have been taken up by a particular online persona, combined with variety of other conspiracy theories, both modern and classic, and been transformed in the Coronavirus Era into a kind of cult. I am speaking, of course, about Qanon, a kind of anonymous prophet for today’s conservative conspiracy theorists. It all began back in early October, 2017, when Donald Trump posed for photos with a group of military leaders and, smirking, made a cryptic comment about a calm before a storm. Many assumed he was joking, or that if it was anything, it may have been in reference to some imminent military adventure, but to conspiracy enthusiasts, or those eager to dupe them, it was a perfect segue into wild theories. Before the end month, a post called “Calm Before the Storm” appeared on the “politically incorrect” board of the website 4chan, a home away from home for Nazis and incels where most users forego a username in favor of appearing “anonymous.” But this poster, who was claiming inside information about Hillary Clinton’s impending detainment and extradition, used the moniker Q, which many assumed was in reference to some clearance authorization for top secret data in the Department of Energy, though the contents of Q’s posts seem to claim White House access rather than any knowledge of nuclear materials. For all we know, the poster originally meant it as a reference to the omniscient character of Q in Star Trek the Next Generation, meant to indicate his or her being all knowing, and the connection to a top secret clearance authorization was a happy accident. The poster, or posters, as they often refer to themselves as “we,” certainly encouraged the idea that they had intimate knowledge of the goings on at the highest level of government, and they painted President Trump as a lone warrior against a deep state conspiracy, insisting, in fact, that he was winning this battle. They depicted him as being in total control, just biding his time until the forthcoming “storm,” or “great awakening,” when he will finally make his perfectly orchestrated move to checkmate the cabal of globalists that control everything. Who is this cabal? Well, Q remains cryptic, including actual ciphers in posts so that followers can see what they want, implicate who they want to implicate. Certainly the Clintons, who it was claimed were the real subject of Mueller’s investigation, and establishment Democrats generally, but the followers of Qanon were not satisfied with such a prosaic conspiracy. They wanted to fold in the greatest hits of every wild conspiracy theory for the last hundred years, so they embraced Pizzagate and made their deep state a pedophile ring, and they revived the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic of the 1980s to make them actual devil-worshipping eaters of children. They take up the Jewish World Conspiracy by arguing that Jewish banking families like the Rothschilds are behind everything, and they follow in the path of many who came before them in pointing at Freemasons and the Illuminati. Indeed, a key element of their theory, that the deep state cabal with whom Trump is doing battle engages in drinking the blood of children and harvesting adrenochrome from abused children’s brains, seems to echo directly some of the more outlandish claims John Robison made, without evidence, against the French scientists he hated and accused of being Illuminist conspirators before the French Revolution: Robison claimed that they would purchase children from the poor in order to dissect their living brains in search of a life force, a horrifying mad-scientist experiment that even the police were supposedly powerless to stop. So it seems nothing that Qanon spews is new. They’re just dredging up baseless conspiracy theories that have been around since the Enlightenment, and have been influencing U.S. politics since at least 1798.

In choosing a place to start with a discussion of the Illuminati’s presence in America, or its supposed presence, then the clearest starting point would be to discuss the Great Seal of the United States. This is image you see on the dollar bill. On one side, there is an eagle wearing a striped shield, grasping arrows in one talon and an olive branch in the other, with a constellation of stars over its head and the Latin Motto E Pluribus Unum. On the other side is the iconic pyramid with a floating and radiant eye in its peak, with the Roman numerals for the year of our independence at its base and two Latin phrases: Annuit Coeptis above, meaning God has favored our undertakings, and Novus Ordo Seclorum below, meaning “a new order of the ages.” It is this second image that drives conspiracy theories about Illuminati influence at the dawn of our nation, especially since the phrase New World Order has come to be associated with the supposed worldwide conspiracy. In reality, the notion and phrase would not actually appear until the middle of the 20th century, with a push toward world governing bodies like the League of Nations. The phrase Novus Ordo Seclorum can be traced back to the poet Virgil, who in a passage of the fourth Eclogue used similar language to describe the coming of a golden age of justice. So it was really a reference to the idea that the independence of America represented the dawning of a new age, which it was widely regarded as signaling. Many will say that the eye in the triangle is Illuminati iconography, but this is not accurate. The Illuminati used the symbol of an owl on a book. The radiant eye used on our seal is the Eye of Providence, supposed to represent God watching over mankind, and thus complementing the motto above it on the seal. The Eye of Providence would go on to become a common Masonic symbol, but it’s unclear whether it was common among Freemasons before its adoption on the Great Seal of the United States. Today, people try to claim that the triangle is an Illuminati sign, and this appears to have come from lore about the symbolism on our Great Seal. The problem with this is that the Eye of Providence was suggested as an element of the seal in August of 1776, during the first committee on the topic, which included Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. At that time, the Bavarian Illuminati was just a fledgling club among university students in Ingolstadt, as I indicated in Part One. The inclusion of the Eye of Providence seems to be an earnest attempt to illustrate through symbolism that God approved of their democratic experiment and nothing more. As for the eye being enclosed in a triangle, that wasn’t because it was pictured as the tip of a pyramid, for we see even in early versions of the seal without the pyramid that the eye was in a triangle. It may be that the triangular shape of the seal’s eye was due to the importance of geometry and triangles specifically to Freemasons, as at least some on the committee certainly were Masons. This would have nothing to do with the Illuminati, however, as the Bavarian order had yet to spread among continental Masonic lodges, and the brand of Masonry in Revolutionary America was far different from continental Masonry anyway. The other possibility is that the triangular shape represents the trinity, making it simply a Christian symbol that ironically has encouraged a fear of a sinister anti-Christian conspiracy for decades.

The reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, via Wikimedia Commons. (Use of this image is in no way meant to convey the false impression that any part of this article or podcast episode is sponsored or approved by the Government of the United States or by any department, agency, or instrumentality thereof)

Knowledge of the Bavarian Illuminati did not reach American shores until the work of John Robison and Abbé Barruel did. Interestingly, neither Robison nor Barruel suggested that the American Revolution had been orchestrated by the Illuminati as they claimed the French Revolution had been. However, they both vaguely and without evidence suggested that the Illuminati had begun infiltrating Masonic lodges there, Barruel by stating that “sects equally inimical to Royalty and Christianity are daily increasing in numbers and strength, particularly in North America,” and Robison by including America on a list of countries with lodges corrupted by the Illuminati, assuring his readers in parentheses that there were “several” there. As obscure and ambiguous as these claims were, they still touched off an Illuminati panic in America because of prevailing political and ecclesiastical conditions. For simplicity’s sake, it can be characterized as similar to modern America. At the time, there were two principal parties, the conservative Federalist party that held control of both houses of Congress as well as the presidency under John Adams, and their more progressive rivals, the Democratic-Republican party, championed by Thomas Jefferson, who contrary to the sentiments of most Federalists believed that the French were our revolutionary brethren. In fact, the country was in the midst of a diplomatic and trade crisis with the revolutionary government of France when American editions of Robison’s and Barruel’s books were being published. Called the XYZ affair, it involved the refusal of an American diplomatic commission to pay off French officials, and it led to an undeclared naval war between our countries called the Quasi-War. To those with anti-French views at the time, the Illuminati conspiracy theory gave further reason to distrust and hate any post-revolution government of France and allowed the Federalists to paint themselves as the last bulwark against a further lawless and godless brand of revolution that, if the conspirators had their way, could consume our young republic the way that it had France. It was a perfect political barb to fling at their political rivals, as well, for rather than engaging in legitimate debate about our relationship with France, the Federalists could make a straw man of the Jeffersonians and say their sympathy for the French proved they were in on the Illuminati conspiracy. And just as conservatives in Britain had attempted to delegitimize the Irish rebellion by calling it an Illuminati plot, after the conspiracy theory reached America, the rural Whiskey Rebellion against a whiskey tax during Washington’s presidency was later recast as proof of Illuminati machinations in our country. Even George Washington, who was sympathetic to Federalist policies but had always tried to remain non-partisan, let himself be swayed by the conspiracy theory. While at first he expressed doubt that any Masonic lodges in America were “contaminated with the principles ascribed to the Society of the Illuminati,” only a month later he qualified that assessment and wrote that “individuals of them may have done it,” and the idea that some founders of lodges and democratic societies in America “actually had a separation of the People from their Government in view” he then characterized as “too evident to be questioned.” But it’s clear from his letters that the only evidence he is referring to is the work of John Robison, which was, of course, no evidence at all.

There were, however, more forces than just the political pushing the American people to believe in an active Illuminati plot in America in those years. Orthodox Congregational ministers of New England in that time had seen their power and influence wane with the rise of millennial doctrines and evangelical faiths after the Great Awakening (the historical one, not Qanon’s imagined “Great Awakening”). Predictably, these clergy attributed the changes to impiety and a widespread corruption of morals. To them, the works of Robison and Barruel explained the turning away from their brand of religion as the result of an anti-Christian plot. The appeal is understandable. Their flocks were only shrinking because Illuminati agents of the devil were secretly corrupting their society. Reverend Jedidiah Morse, famous for his work in American geography, was the most adamant in his preaching of the Illuminati conspiracy theory. From his Boston pulpit in May of 1798, Morse declared that there was a conspiracy “to root out and abolish Christianity, and overturn all civil government.” Soon Morse was not the only one taking up the conspiracy claim. Congregationalist theologian and president of Yale Dr. Timothy Dwight preached it as well. This clerical campaign represents a concrete effort to move away from the enlightenment ideal of the separation of church and state and an effort to Christianize the nation. In the ramp up to the presidential election of 1800, these Congregationalists naturally threw their weight behind the party and candidate that had positioned themselves as being against the Illuminati threat by being anti-French: the Federalists and John Adams. So in an American election year, we have preachers at their pulpits convincing their parishioners that they must vote a certain way because of a false conspiracy theory. It’s just this sort of thing that the Johnson Amendment of 1954, which denied tax exemption to organizations involved in partisan politics, was meant to prevent, an amendment that the Trump administration has attempted to do away with recently through executive order and tax legislation. With the power of New England organized religion behind them, helping to convince even the less politically conscious that Thomas Jefferson was a threat to America, they likely would have succeeded in getting Adams reelected. But they didn’t count on their conspiracy theory being turned around on them.

Portrait of Jedidiah Morse. Public domain work available at Wikimedia Commons.

There is a strong argument to be made that the result of the election of 1800 owed a lot to a series of newspaper articles that appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper called the Aurora during the years leading up to the election. This anti-Federalist, Jeffersonian organ saw its circulation increase substantially after it began publishing the diatribes of a preacher named John Ogden, who spent many of his columns enumerating the offenses of the Federalist powers against, for example, an innocent congressman they had jailed for political reasons, or a poor widow that they had ruined. Rather than focusing his withering articles on only the politicians in power, though, he identified the orthodox Congregationalists of New England, especially Yale’s Dr. Dwight, as the pharisees that reinforced their power. He depicted Dwight as a popish figure and accused him of indoctrinating the youth at Yale, and he characterized the existing power structure as a blend of both priestcraft and aristocracy that was threatening to destroy the foundations of our new democratic republic. And when Morse and Dwight started their Illuminati disinformation campaign, Ogden flung their accusations right back at them, calling them the Clerical Illuminati of New England. By his reckoning, the Federalist brand of government looked far more like the authoritarianism of the Bavarian Illuminati, and the orthodox Congregationalist suppression of alternative doctrines showed that they were the true enemies of religion. Ogden’s Illuminati looked far more like the modern idea of a “deep state,” an entrenched power structure, but rather than a bureaucratic machine, it was a secret marriage of church and state. In the topsy-turvy, paranoid rhetoric of that election year, the fact that the Federalists and Congregationalists were so vehemently insisting that the Democratic-Republican Jeffersonians were the Illuminati was the clearest evidence that it was the other way around, since clearly the Illuminati would accuse their enemies of being the conspirators in order to hide the truth that they were the conspirators themselves. Ogden passed away before the election was decided, but his widely read counter-accusations appear to have been a decisive factor, helping to sweep Thomas Jefferson into office in 1800 despite the fact that many still suspected him of being a godless agent of chaos.

After the election of 1800, with no concrete evidence of the conspiracy ever coming out despite the Reverend Jedidiah Morse insisting that he had incontrovertible proof in his possession, the Illuminati scare just dissipated. President Jefferson clearly wasn’t going to abolish all religion and overthrow all civil government, and a few years later, the French appeared to be moving away from the fearful brand of democracy associated with the Illuminati conspiracy when their Senate proclaimed Napoleon Emperor. Thus, the specter of the Illuminati faded into the background of political discourse for about a quarter century, until the kidnapping and suspected murder of one man once again dredged up the talk of a sinister Illuminati conspiracy in relation to Freemasonry. In 1826, a man named Captain William Morgan who had recently been involved with Masonry in upstate New York advertised his intention to publish a book revealing their initiation rites. In retaliation, some local Masons had him jailed on a minor debt then pulled him out of the jailhouse, after which he was never seen again. Outrage over this crime led to a political movement to suppress Freemasonry in America, not because of any specific Illuminati-esque plot, though. Rather, it was because many civil servants were also Masons, and it was argued that their vows of loyalty to their lodges and fellow Masons superseded their oaths of office, inviting corruption. Out of this movement grew an organized third political party in America for the first time, the Anti-Masonic Party, which in the 1830s was actually the first party to ever conduct a convention for the nomination of a presidential candidate. During these years of rampant anti-Masonic rhetoric, the word Illuminati was certainly tossed about frequently again, as if it were a slur synonymous with Freemason, for Barruel and Robison had effectively linked the two forever. If you want to know more about William Morgan and this chapter of American history, you can get yourself a copy of my historical novel, Manuscript Found, in which I go into far more detail. Maybe one day I’ll do an entire episode on the topic, but for our purposes in this study, suffice it to say that this was only a blip in the story of the Illuminati conspiracy theory in America, a short-lived and minor resurgence of the language rather than the theory itself.

A depiction of Captain William Morgan’s alleged murder at the hands of Freemasons. Public Domain work available at Wikimedia Commons.

For a long time after the Anti-Masonic movement, conspiracy theory in America was more dominated by nativism, specifically positing that the Catholic Church was plotting to overthrow our democracy. As though taking up the legacy of his father, the Reverend Jedidiah Morse’s son, Samuel Morse, the telegraphy pioneer, spread his own brand of conspiracy theory in Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States. Samuel Morse’s conspiracy theory was not about the Illuminati, but in some regards it shared themes with the theory his father had promulgated. Both postulated that a sinister cabal out of Europe was secretly acting to undermine American government and religion. Also, just like the Illuminati conspiracy theory, Samuel Morse’s Anti-Catholic conspiracy theory developed into a creed justifying bigotry, specifically against the Irish and other Catholic immigrant groups. As for the Illuminati conspiracy theory, it would eventually become inextricably linked to anti-Semitism, but that would not occur until the 19th century, after the emergence of forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Ever since the Middle Ages and the rise of the Blood Libel, there had been some form of a conspiracy theory that Jews all over world conspired against Christians, but it wasn’t until the Protocols hoax that this conspiracy theory took a form undeniably similar to that of the Illuminati, spreading the idea that Jews were not just scheming to desecrate the host or commit ritual murder or poison wells… but that they were engaged in an organized worldwide plot to overthrow all governments and religions. Interestingly, the tendency to link Jews to the Illuminati conspiracy theory seems to have been present from the beginning. In 1806, Abbé Barruel received a letter from a Piedmontese soldier named Jean Baptiste Simonini that claimed it was really the Jews behind the Freemasons and the Illuminati. To his credit, after some further research, Barruel decided that this Simonini fellow was wrong, that although many Jews were Freemasons, it was the Freemasons generally, manipulated by the Illuminati, who had conspired to foment the French Revolution. And he even suggested that blaming the Jews was dangerous and could lead to a massacre.

It would not be until the work of one Nesta Webster that the Illuminati theory and the Jewish World Conspiracy theory would become more concretely combined. Daughter of a successful banker, Nesta Webster was a British woman of means who had travelled the world. Along the way, she developed the notion that she was the reincarnation of a French duchess who had been guillotined during the Terror. This started her interest in the French Revolution, which she began to research and write about, along the way, predictably, encountering the work of Abbé Barruel, which she accepted enthusiastically. In her book The French Revolution: A Study in Democracy, she revived Barruel’s theory of an Illuminist-Masonic plot having orchestrated the French Revolution, and her work was accepted as credible by none other than Winston Churchill, who then helped spread the ideas of Barruel further, stating “This conspiracy against civilization dates from the days of Weishaupt... as a modern historian Mrs Webster has so ably shown, it played a recognisable role on the French Revolution.” But Nesta Webster did not just parrot Barruel’s ideas. She took them further, suggesting that Communism and the widespread European revolutions of 1848 were later examples of the Illuminati revolution machine at work, and that Bolshevism in Russia was the new Jacobinism, the latest evidence of the Illuminati plot. After developing this idea in her next book, The French Terror and Russian Bolshevism, she eventually made the leap to anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, based on the idea promulgated in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that Bolshevism was a Jewish plot, arguing that the Illuminati conspiracy to spark revolutions the world over had been a Jewish conspiracy plot all along, with the Rothschild Jewish banking family behind it. Unsurprisingly, Nesta Webster’s far right views led her to become involved with British fascist groups. And I’m not just labeling these organizations fascist; they were explicitly self-described fascist groups, like the British Fascisti, comprised of members of the British Conservative Party who were troubled by the Bolshevik Revolution, inspired by Mussolini, and described themselves as Christian patriots; and later, the British Union of Fascists, an actual fascist political party. By the 1930s, Nesta Webster was defending Nazi persecution of Jews and praising Hitler for fighting the supposed Jewish conspiracy.

Photo of young Nesta Webster. Public domain work available at Wikimedia Commons.

Returning to America and the influence of the Illuminati conspiracy in our own politics, it may come as no surprise that white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan discovered the writings of Nesta Webster and touted them as scholarly evidence of a Jewish plot against Christians. But it was Webster’s linking of the Illuminati and a Jewish World Conspiracy to Communism that really drove the resurgence of the theory in America. In the midst of the so-called Second Red Scare and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaign against Communism in America, the John Birch Society was formed by a Massachusetts candymaker, and it was this group that would bring Nesta Webster’s revitalized version of Barruel and Robison’s Illuminati theory into modern U.S.  politics, and in the process reshape conservative politics in America. Named after a military intelligence officer killed in a confrontation with Chinese Communist forces at the end of World War II, The John Birch Society made clear from the beginning that they believed the threat of Communism was far more than an economic model or political ideology. One quote from their founding meeting clarifies their view of Communism as a worldwide conspiracy, as there at the start of things, they asserted that “both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a ‘one-world socialist government.’” Through their publications, Review of the News and American Opinion and later The New American, they spread their version of a worldwide Communist conspiracy, and folding Nesta Webster’s version of events into their own, it just became more and more massive and sinister. The version of history spread by the John Birch Society is that, after pulling off the French Revolution through their front groups, the Illuminati continued their orchestration of revolutionary activity through other secret societies, like the Carbonari in Italy and Masonic or Masonry-inspired societies across Europe. They saw only the machinations of the Illuminati leading up to the Springtime of the Peoples in numerous countries during 1848. Despite the fact that they were more like the American and French revolutions in that for the most part they sought the end of absolute monarchy and the establishment of representative democracy, the John Birch Society characterized them as the first Communist revolutions, kicked off by Karl Marx’s publication of The Communist Manifesto. And rather than admitting that Communism might have been a genuine historical development or a natural evolution of socialist thought, they said this too was part of the plot, reducing Marx to nothing more than a hireling paid by the Illuminati to write the manifesto in order to provide a new revolutionary philosophy for a new age. Of course, one can easily counter this idea by citing Marx’s work as a newspaper editor in the Rhineland years before he was supposedly hired by the Illuminati, as a clear progression of his theories can be discerned. But the John Birch Society was, to use Marx’s turn of phrase, haunted by the specter of Communism, seeing in every progressive, every liberal, even every moderate conservative, a secret agent of the Illuminati.

Thus the Illuminati came to be used, once again, as a tool of the conservative right, especially the far right, as a weapon against the far left that they feared or hated. But just as in the election of 1800, it would soon be taken up by their rivals and used against them. During the 1960’s, riding a cresting wave of counter-culture and civil disobedience, a new concept of the Illuminati was born. It started in the pages of Playboy Magazine, which published a letter about the Illuminati suggesting they might be behind the assassinations of King and Kennedy and giving a false background that the Illuminati could be traced to the Historical Arabic Order of Assassins, or Hashishim, though there is no clear connection between them or any other ancient mystical group, as discussed in my most recent patron exclusive, The Myth of Occult Illuminism. Then more letters appeared, each contradicting the last, more and more confusing the understanding of the Illuminati theory that I have tried to clarify in detail during this series. It turns out that these letters were fake, written by a Playboy staff member named Robert Anton Wilson, in collaboration with one Kerry Thornley, author of a little pamphlet called Principia Discordia. Thornley’s book parodied religious tracts and promoted a satirical religion in which the goddess of chaos is worshipped and adherents are encouraged to perpetrate hoaxes like the Illuminati letters to Playboy. Wilson, who would go on to adapt some of these ideas into a popular gonzo fiction series called the Illuminatus! Trilogy, explained that the goal of Discordianism was to fight authoritarianism by spreading disinformation in order to make people think. Their goal in their fake letters to Playboy was to flood readers with competing viewpoints in the hope that they would think critically in order to resolve the conflicts. Ironically, though, it had the opposite effect, increasing awareness of and belief in this baseless conspiracy theory. The Illuminatus! Trilogy is even sometimes mistaken as an exposé of Illuminati activity in modern times, like a sequel to the works of Robison, Barruel, and Webster, when it is clearly an absurdist satire. 

Satirical song about The John Birch Society from the 1960s, performed by the Chad Mitchell Trio, featuring John Denver.

So here we are in the 21st century, and conspiracy theories are a major component of American cultural and political life, playing perhaps the biggest part in a presidential election since 1800. And I would be remiss if I didn’t make it clear that belief in conspiracy theory is not exclusive to the far right. As the example from the pages of Playboy in the 1960s shows, plenty on the left see the Illuminati or similar shadowy groups as being behind the assassination of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. Liberal proponents of the Illuminati conspiracy love to point to George H. W. Bush’s speech about the Gulf War in 1991, in which he mentions a New World Order, as proof of his involvement in the conspiracy, and 9/11 Truthers will suggest that the neoconservative administration of George W. Bush was secretly behind the September 11th attacks, perpetrating them in order to justify war in the Middle East. Indeed, Qanon paints itself as a non-partisan conspiracy theorist movement, since they see not only establishment Democrats but also establishment Republicans like the Bushes as part of the evil cabal they envision Trump heroically battling. To be clear, I am also not asserting that belief in conspiracy theory indicates stupidity or mental illness. A recent study shows that more than half of all Americans believe in at least one major conspiracy theory. And this is attributed to a specific mindset and psychological factors such as the cognitive biases that I listed at the end of Part One. Another factor that can encourage even very intelligent and level-headed people to engage in conspiracist thinking is narcissism, as the idea that we are privy to the truth when so many are deluded can be very appealing. Existential crises also seem linked to the development of this mindset. Feelings of personal anxiety and alienation, especially when combined with anxiety over the state of society, can draw us down the path of spiraling conspiracy theory, and doesn’t that just describe how we are all feeling right now in 2020? Nevertheless, another recent study does seem to suggest that this “conspiracy mindset” does disproportionately affect those on the right side of the political spectrum.

It used to be that conspiratorial thinking was more common among the right when the left were in power, and more common among the left when the right held the reins of government. Now, though, with a conspiracy theory salesman in the highest office of the land, this no longer seems accurate. Even The John Birch Society, purveyor of a Jewish World Conspiracy theory thinly veiled as anti-Communist conservative patriotism, has agreed that their brand of paranoid politics contributed to or even is responsible for the rise of Trump in their article “Is ‘Trumpism’ Really ‘Bircherism’?” In the 1960s, when the JBS first came on the scene, true conservatives like William F. Buckley, Jr., decried their feverish paranoia as fringe madness and warned that “sincere conservatives” ought to distance themselves from their views, which he described as “far removed from reality and common sense.” Yet today, Bircherism has become the norm for the GOP, or at least for the version of it that Trump and his base have made dominant. One cannot help but see a parallel here of a political society convincing a large swathe of the common people that the powers that be must be overthrown… could the John Birch Society and Qanon be the real Illuminati? Of course it’s possible that Trump and the anonymous Q really believe the misinformation they’re spreading. One last psychological feature of conspiracy belief is projection, the idea that one assumes those in power have undesirable character attributes because of one’s own undesirable character, and this could well explain why the Trump administration, which has proven itself to be the most corrupt administration in modern history, might spread the idea that their political rivals are secretly so very corrupt. But to engage in a bit of tit-for-tat, as Ogden did back in the election of 1800, consider the notion that there is no “deep state” arrayed against Trump, but rather that, by taking over the Republican Party apparatus the way the Illuminati tried to take over Freemasonry, it is his own power that has become entrenched. Ponder a moment whether it’s possible that, rather than being engaged in a secret war against Satanic establishment powers as Q claims, Trump has already overthrown establishment powers to raise up an extremist, far-right New World Order. Just as it was once said that the Illuminati might point to their enemies and call them the Illuminati, couldn’t it also be said that Trump and his bootlickers in the John Birch Society and Qanon and all the far right madmen and talking heads, like Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Ben Shapiro, Dinesh D’Souza, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity, are all agents of the real conspiracy, pointing their finger with one hand so you don’t pay attention to what the other hand is doing? And if that sounds too far-fetched for you, then you should find all of their massive conspiracy theories just as unbelievable.

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Further Reading

Barruel, Augustin. Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism. American Council on Economics and Society, 1995. Internet Archive, archive.org/stream/BarruelMemoirsIllustratingTheHistoryOfJacobinism/barruel+Memoirs+Illustrating+the+History+of+Jacobinism_djvu.txt.

Briceland, Alan V. “The Philadelphia Aurora, The New England Illuminati, and The Election of 1800.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Jan. 1976, pp. 3-36. PennState University Libraries, journals.psu.edu/pmhb/article/view/43215/42936.

Buckley, William F. “Goldwater, the John Birch Society, and Me.” Commentary, www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/william-buckley-jr/goldwater-the-john-birch-society-and-me/.

Calfas, Jennifer. “President Trump Warns of 'the Calm Before the Storm' During Military Meeting.” Time, 5 Oct. 2017, time.com/4971738/donald-trump-calm-before-the-storm-military-white-house/.

Coaston, Jane. “QAnon, the Scarily Popular Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theory, Explained.” Vox, 21 Aug. 2020, www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/1/17253444/qanon-trump-conspiracy-theory-4chan-explainer.

Dickey, Colin. “Did an Illuminati Conspiracy Theory Help Elect Thomas Jefferson?” Politico, 29 March 2020, www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/29/illuminati-conspiracy-theory-thomas-jeffersion-1800-election-152934.

Galer, Sophia Smith. “The Accidental Invention of the Illuminati Conspiracy.” BBC, 11 July 2020, www.bbc.com/future/article/20170809-the-accidental-invention-of-the-illuminati-conspiracy.

“The Great Seal of the United States.” U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs, July 2003, 2009-2017.state.gov/documents/organization/27807.pdf.

Griffin, Andrew. “What Is Qanon? The Origins of Bizarre Conspiracy Theory Spreading Online.” Independent, 24 Aug. 2020, www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/qanon-explained-what-trump-russia-investigation-pizzagate-a8845226.html.

Hofman, Amos. “Opinion, Illusion, and the Illusion of Opinion: Barruel's Theory of Conspiracy.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, 1993, pp. 27–60. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2739276. Accessed 15 Sept. 2020.

Jay, Mike. “Darkness Over All: John Robison and the Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy.” The Public Domain Review, 2 April 2014, publicdomainreview.org/essay/darkness-over-all-john-robison-and-the-birth-of-the-illuminati-conspiracy.

Martineau, Oaris. “The Storm Is the New Pizzagate — Only Worse.” New York, 19 Dec. 2017, nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/qanon-4chan-the-storm-conspiracy-explained.html.

Mason, Paul. “The QAnon Conspiracy Theory Is Absurd but Dangerous. Politicians Must Confront It.” NewStatesman, 2 Sep. 2020, www.newstatesman.com/world/2020/09/qanon-conspiracy-theory-absurd-dangerous-politicians-must-confront-it.

Mounier, J. J. On the Influence Attributed to Philosophers, Free-Masons, and to the Illuminati on the Revolution of France. W. and C Spilsbury, 1801. HathiTrust Digital Library, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101007617051&view=1up&seq=5.

Moyer, Melinda Wenner. “People Drawn to Conspiracy Theories Share a Cluster of Psychological Features.” Scientific American, Springer Nature America, Inc., 1 March 2019, www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-drawn-to-conspiracy-theories-share-a-cluster-of-psychological-features/.

Newman, Alex. “Is ‘Trumpism’ Really ‘Bircherism’?” The New American, 22 Nov. 2016, thenewamerican.com/is-trumpism-really-bircherism/.

Robison, John. Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. T. Dobson, 1798. Project Gutenburg, www.gutenberg.org/files/47605/47605-h/47605-h.htm.

Snell, Rachel A. “Jedidiah Morse and the Crusade for the New Jerusalem: The Cultural Catalysts of the Bavarian Illuminati Conspiracy” (Thesis). The Honors College at the University of Maine, May 2006. DigitalCommons@UMaine, digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=honors.

Stanton, Gregory. “QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded.” Just Security, 9 Sep. 2020, www.justsecurity.org/72339/qanon-is-a-nazi-cult-rebranded/.

Taylor, Michael. “British Conservatism, the Illuminati, and the Conspiracy Theory of the French Revolution, 1797–1802.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 47, no. 3, 2014, pp. 293–312. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24690289. Accessed 15 Sept. 2020.

Vittert, Liberty. “Are conspiracy theories on the rise in the US?” The Conversation, 18 Sep. 2019, theconversation.com/are-conspiracy-theories-on-the-rise-in-the-us-121968.

Wolf, Jessica. “Research Confirms Political Views Predict Whether People Trust False Information About Dangers, Even After Party Shift.” Phys.org, 18 Dec. 2018, phys.org/news/2018-12-political-views-people-false-dangers.html.